Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Playing What-If Games

There’s more than one way to skin a cat—or plan a project. The project’s stakeholders may ask for the moon—but when they see how much it costs to land on that hunk of rock, they might backpedal and ask for alternative plans. They’ll have questions like, “How much less would it cost if we cut this portion of the scope?”, “How much longer will it take if we add these change requests to the plan?” and, invariably, “Why can’t we do all this extra work in the same timeframe and for the same cost?” In Project, inactive tasks and the Compare Project feature help you evaluate alternatives. This section shows you how to use both.

Inactivating Tasks

If nothing seems to shorten your project’s schedule or reduce its budget, a reduction in scope may be in order. As project manager, you can’t arbitrarily eliminate scope. Only the stakeholders can redefine the scope, and even then, only if the project’s customer approves. Decisions have a way of changing, so making tasks inactive is a great way to cut scope. Should the stakeholders decide to revert to the original plan later on, you can reactivate the inactive tasks without skipping a beat.

Tip

Inactive tasks also work well if you want to document nice-to-have work. Create tasks, assign resources to them, and fill in other fields; then make the tasks inactive. That way, their values are visible (and editable) but don’t affect your project schedule. If you find that the project has the time and budget for the work, then you can ...