Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Scheduling Tasks to Accommodate Specific Dates

Anyone who’s taken a project-management course knows the monumental tedium of manually calculating start dates, finish dates, slack time, and other schedule values. Letting Project calculate a schedule frees up your time for more important project-management activities, so normally you don’t want to hobble the program’s scheduling capabilities. From time to time, though, you need more control over task dates. (See Chapter 3 to learn when it makes sense to take control of scheduling and how to do so with Project’s manual scheduling feature.) Suppose the backhoe you need isn’t available to dig the foundation until after June 1. Or the new database guru you just hired will start work on October 12 so won’t start her tasks before that date. Or the tradeshow your company is attending takes place from July 8–12 whether your booth is ready or not.

To keep your schedule low maintenance, let Project calculate it as much as possible. That way, the program recalculates dates automatically when predecessors get delayed or take more (or less) time than planned. However, when you want tasks to occur on or around specific dates, you can make that happen in two ways:

• Set a task’s schedule mode to Manually Scheduled. When tasks are set to Auto Scheduled mode, Project does what you expect project-management software to do: It calculates when tasks start and finish based on predecessors, resource availability, and so on. Setting a task to Manually Scheduled ...