Roll-up tasks

[Tim]

Can anyone give me a pointer for usage of MS Project 2002?

The problem is this: I have an overall task, "Overall 1",
to which I don't associate any duration. It is present
just to keep things organized logically. I assign that
task to "Resource A", just for ownership. Once again,
there is no explicit work for "Resource A" to perform.
Underneath "Overall 1", I have "Subtask 1" and "Subtask
2", which do have durations associated with them. Also, I
assign one of them to "Resource A" and "Resource B". When
I go to look at the Resource Usage View to see if my
resources are overbooked, it looks like "Resource A" is
overbooked, because it treats "Overall 1" as a real task
that needs to be performed. That is not what I meant by
assigning ownership of it to "Resource A". There must be
an easy way to tell Project to not treat this as a task,
but I haven't found it yet. Any thoughts?

 

[Pratta]

Tim
I consider it very dangerous to allocate resources to
overall or summary tasks. I run filters to ensure that I
don't do so inadvertently (usually by promoting tasks). A
summary task is just an overall reflection of what is
contained below. Apart from the allocation issues you have
discovered, if you insert a "Work" column in your test
plan and complete some tasks, you will see unexpected
results in the summary fields that indicate all is not
well. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I understand what you are trying to do, but I would
reflect the owners name or title in the Overall task name,
and steer completely away from adding resources to summary
tasks.