Re: New user question

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 22:08, Laurent Duperval wrote:
> Every other Saturday (which is another problem) I have to place a call 
> to reserve a spot in a show. But before I do that, I have to make sure 
> thata certain tasks are completed beforehand.

ok, yeah.  MrProject can help with tracking dependencies, but not with
recurring tasks.  You'd have to set each occurrence up individually.

> Hmmm.... Ok. I was wondering, If I say that a task needs 100 days to be 
> completed and after 50 days, only 30% of the work has been done, will 
> MrP automatically push the date back? How does percentage completed 
> affect the Gantt chart? For example, I started something that takes 12 
> weeks to complete, but now I have to suspend that task for a few weeks. 
> Once I restart it, the end date will be pushed back (I can't speed it 
> up. It's a time sensitive thing and it really takes 12 weeks. No, I'm 
> not an alcoholic...).

Nope, it won't automatically push the finish date back.  What you'll see
is that the Gantt chart has 2 vertical dotted lines.  The leftmost one
is the project start date, and the other is the current date.  The Gantt
will display progress on a task by shading the bar representing the task
by the %complete (much like a progress bar).  The difference between the
shaded portion of the bar and the line representing the current date is
how far behind (or ahead) you are on that task (Schedule Variance in
earned value terms)

|xxxx============
|             |
Start      Today

Since in your case you can't add resources to speed completion, it makes
sense to push out the completion date.  If a feature like that were to
be added, it could become rather complicated I think, since the machine
doesn't know the projected work patterns of the resource.  Should it
assume the task will complete based on the current average rate of
completion, or based on the owner picking it back up and completing it
based on the original productivity estimate?  I think that might be best
left up to the project manager at this stage in MrProject's development,
although in the future I can see where MrProject might offer a dialog to
help the PM update the schedule based on a choice of calculations.

-- 
Kurt Maute <[email protected]>