Summary Tasks and Subtasks - Calculating Duration

[marchand.tim]

Hello,

I am a new user of Microsoft Project 2003 Professional. I am trying to
outlining a multi phase process where the five phases are displayed as
summary tasks with each having a number of subsequent subtasks. When
entering duration for each subtask, the duration value calculated for
the summary task is the highest subtask duration. For example:

Duration
Summary Task 2
subtask 2
subtask 2
subtask 2

I would be interested in displaying a total duration for the summary
task (Phase) based on the time required to complete each subtask. So,
using the above example, the Summary Task duration value would be 6.

Can this be done?

Thank you very much for your time.

Cheers,

Tim

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Tim --

In the future, please post your questions in either the
microsoft.public.project newsgroup (for questons about the Microsoft Project
desktop app) or in the microsoft.public.project.server newsgroup (for
Project Server questions). To answer your question, you are
misunderstanding how Microsoft Project calculates the Duration of a summary
task. The system calculates the Duration of the summary task from the Start
date of the earliest-starting task to the Finish date of the
latest-finishing task, minus any non-working days. In your example, it
sounds like you have a series of parallel tasks, each of which is 2 days
Duration. There is no way to force Microsoft Project to calculate the
Duration of a summary task any other way. Hope this helps.