Ms projects task dependency

Question

Good day

If I have task 1 linked with task 2 FS, and I start showing progress as task 1, 50% complete and task 2, 100% complete, the MSP honours that. This is however not possible as task 1 must finish before task 2 can start. Why is it doing it?

Answer 1

Theuns Eloff,

Project ("it") is not doing it, you are. If you are expecting Project to have intelligence that says, "hey, you can't show progress on a task that has a FS dependency", then I'm afraid you are asking too much. Project has NO intelligence, it responds to inputs by the user, whether they make logical sense or not.

Project will catch some scheduling issues (File > Options > [schedule warnings, planning wizard, etc.]), but it can't inject thought into the process.

When a plan is developed it may indeed be true that task 1 must be completed before task 2 can start. However, things can change, perhaps the dependency was not hard (i.e. some part of task 2 can in fact start before task 1 finishes), or maybe the dependency wasn't valid at all. That's part of project management, creating a plan, statusing the plan, and adjusting the plan as reality prevails.

Hope this helps.

John

Answer 2

Theuns Eloff,

My question is what do you expect MSP to do instead?

You ask why MSP allows you to do something which is illogical or impossible or does not make sense.

As John says already, "it" doesn't do it. You do it, and MSP allows you to do it.

You may object, and expect MSP to prevent this or warn about it.

I have had conversations where people say that MSP is broken because it allows things like this, or doesn't warn about it.

It's not broken, but it won't do the thinking for you. If you do something which is nonsense, it will obey, but it certainly displays what you have done, or there are formatting options which will display it. You just have to interpret the display and decide whether it is nonsense or not.

Other things which MSP allows which are nonsense are:

Manually scheduled tasks, especially when mixed in with auto scheduled tasks.

Predecessors/successors, resources, costs on summaries.

Actual duration, work, cost in the future.

Planned/scheduled duration, work, cost in the past.

Predecessors with negative lag.

Scheduling backwards from a finish date.

Some of these might have some usefulness in some particular situations, but generally they are plain wrong.

MSP also allows very poor scheduling practices such as liberal use of date constraints and incomplete CPM networks (such as tasks with no successor).

None of this is a defect of MSP. It is the fault of the way that the project plan has been modeled and the way progress has been entered.

Do you have a status date?

Do you enter % complete (please just don't). This another thing which is allowed but which is so wrong (add it to the list above).

Do you enter % complete or actual start or actual duration without checking to see if the FS predecessor is finished?

If you record "out of sequence" progress like this, do you correct the obviously wrong predecessor?

If you put your example in front of anyone, would they notice that it is wrong?

Probably not.