What would you do if there was a task that absolutely had to be done and yet
no one volunteered to do it? While you might not have the supervisor
authority to mandate that someone work on a certain thing at a certain time,
there's nothing that says you can't "advise" the volunteers when individual
items need to be done in order for the project to be a success and secure
their agreement to that schedule through your powers of persuasion. And to
come up with that "suggested" schedule you'd use exactly the same tools and
techniques as any other business uses to come up with the work schedules for
their projects. The only thing different is the power dynamic that lets an
employer mandate that people do certain things at specifc times.
Project doesn't "mess up" the dates on the graph. Its purpose in life is to
calculate schedules and as such, in the ideal world you don't supply any of
the individual task dates at all. You outline what needs to be done, how
much work is required to complete each step (ie, estimating how long it will
take), and the sequencing that is required. Then Project takes the kickoff
date you supply and tells you when everything needs to start and finish in
order to have the most efficient plan. If you have put in dates and Project
is changing them, it's acting as a reality check and telling you the
schedule as you've tried to input it is probably unworkable or at the very
least isn't as optimized as it could be.
You could put in milestones with fixed dates to represent the finish dates
of the various tasks without detailing activities, duration estimates, or
precedence links, but if you choose to do that you're just using a very
powerful (and expensive) scheduling program as little more than a simple
to-do list with deadlines, something you could easliy do just as well and
much more inexpensively with little more than a planning calendar on the
wall and a box of Magic-Markers.
We'll be more than happy to help you figure out how to use the tool to best
advantage. Making a visit to the MVP website and taking a look at the FAQs
is a great way to start.
