How to Set Constraints and Deadlines in Microsoft Project 2016
During this Microsoft Project 2016 training tutorial video, you will learn about different types of constraints, including As Late As Possible, As Soon As Possible, Finish No Earlier Than a specific date, Finish No Later Than a specific date, Must Finish on a certain date, or Must Start on a certain date. You also will learn more about deadlines.
Video Transcript
Since we last looked at the wedding plan I’ve added quite a bit more detail to it in terms of the durations of many of the tasks and quite a few straightforward dependencies. So for example, if you look down at ID 20, Catering, within that there are two pairs of tasks, Make caterer shortlist and then Book caterer and Finalize menu. I’ve allowed fifteen days for making a shortlist of caterers and talking to them, making a decision about which one to book and then finalizing the menu with them. I’ve allowed fifteen days for each of those tasks. And then I’ve done the same for the baker, the baker who’s going to make the wedding cake.
Now it may look from the current plan that we could get this wedding through very, very quickly. But as you can see one of the main issues is that we’re doing everything all at once right at the start of the project. And in reality that’s not what would happen. There just wouldn’t be enough time in a short period of time, of in this case a few weeks, to do all of those things at the same time. And as we’ll see later on in the course there are various factors, various reasons that will force us to spread these activities out over time. But for the moment I want to just leave the plan like this except for adding a few dependencies that are really very important.
Now one situation that arises very often when you’re working on projects is that there are one or two key decisions to make. And there are certain things you must do before you make those key decisions and there are certain other things you can’t do until after you’ve made those key decisions. And what I want to look at first in this section is the very key decision of the wedding date, the date of the wedding itself. Now you can’t do everything before you decide on the date. So for example we talked in the previous section about making out the guest list and sending out the invitations. You can’t send out the invitations until you’ve set the wedding date. But you can’t set the wedding date until you know that the venue you’re going to use is available. You may also want to make sure that the venue you’re going to use for what we call in the UK the reception is available as well. But you are going to have to take some things on trust. So for example, you may have to say well I’m going to fix the wedding date and then see which photographers are available and book one of those photographers. So what I’m going to assume here in the wedding plan it that there are two or three key things that must happen before we can set the wedding date. And that from that point onwards various other things will be dependent on knowing that wedding date.
So appreciating once again that there is quite a lot of detail missing from this plan. I’ve been through the plan and I’ve decided that the two key things that I need to do are 18, that is Book the reception venue, and 38, that is Book the wedding venue.
So I’m going to go up to Set wedding date and rather than use the linking mechanism that I’ve used before I’m going to type those IDs straight into the predecessors field for Set wedding date. So I’m going to put in 18, 38 and tick it. And that gives me a date on which I’m going to set the wedding date. I should point out that this is not final yet because we have a few more hurdles to overcome a little bit later on. And then from the setting the wedding date, for example, I can say well if I select Set wedding date then certainly sending out the invitations will be dependent on that. In reality I need a task in here that says Print the invitations but let’s just stick with Send out invitations for now. Put in the linkage for that. And now we have a more realistic representation of when we’re going to be in a position to send out the invitations.
Particularly in the early stages of creating a project plain it’s important to review the plan from time to time to make sure that things haven’t been missed. I’ve left a couple of items here which clearly have dependencies that aren’t currently represented in the plan. So for instance, task 19, Plan and finalize seating arrangements, and that will clearly need to have the guest list finalized before it can happen. So really a predecessor of Plan and finalize seating arrangements should be task 14.
Now there are still one or two key dependencies that I haven’t put into the plan yet but I want to turn my attention now to Constraints and Deadlines.
Let me insert a completely new task into this schedule. And you see that it is inserted at the project start date. We changed that option much earlier on in the course. And if I open up that task and go to its Advanced Tab I’ll see that the Constraint on that task is that it should Start as soon as possible. And when scheduling from a start date and when you have the project start date as the default date for new tasks that is the Constraint that new tasks get. Generally speaking they should start as soon as possible.
There are a number of constraints that you can set on tasks. As late as possible. This is the default when you are scheduling to an end date. But you can also say that a task should Finish no earlier than a specific date, Finish no later than a specific date, it must Finish on a specific date, it must Start on a specific date, it must Start no earlier than, or Start no later than a certain date.
Now it’s quite often external factors that mean you need to put constraints other than straightforward ones such as soon as possible onto a task. In many cases when you’re scheduling from a start date as we are here As soon as possible is the best bet because you’re basically trying to get all of the tasks done as soon as possible without restricting Project to doing certain things on certain dates. But let’s take an example of a possible Constraint.
Let’s suppose that we already know that one of the bridesmaids who is the bride’s sister is actually out of the country. She’s working abroad at the moment and she’s not going to be available for the Select and order bridesmaid dresses task until the beginning of March 2016. So whatever else happens she won’t be available until then. Now if I double click on that task and go to the Advanced Tab I can say Constraint, Start no earlier than and then I can choose a date of March1, 2016. And when Project 2016 schedules the wedding it will take into account that constraint that we can’t start earlier than that. Now you may want at this point to put a note in here to remind yourself why you put that Constraint in. But as you can see Project 2016 has successfully rescheduled that task to make sure that it doesn’t actually begin until the beginning of March. Now with the plan as it is at the moment and considering that particular task the Constraint that we’ve just added really has had quite an impact on the duration of the whole plan.
So you’ve seen there an example of a Constraint. Let’s look next at Deadlines.
Deadlines in many ways are quite similar to Constraints but there are two or three really important differences. One difference is that a Deadline is very easily visible in the Gantt Chart. It’s actually a physical marker in the Gantt Chart. And you get not only a marker in the Gantt Chart but you can get warning indicators in the indicator column to the left of the table. Another major difference is that although Constraints are used in scheduling, as you saw just now with the limitation on the availability of one of the bridesmaids Deadlines are not actually used in scheduling. They are used in some calculations associated with scheduling but they don’t actually affect the schedule itself. So let’s suppose that we decided, obviously we would want the wedding to be a success, but if possible we’d like it to before the beginning of September 2016, partly because of the weather.
So what I’m going to do is to go down to the Wedding date task itself, the Wedding day, 41, open that up. And I’m going to go to the Advanced Tab and I’m going to put a Deadline on it. And the Deadline I’m going to put on it is September 1, 2016. Click on OK. Now you can’t actually see September at the moment in the Gantt Chart on the right there so let me just zoom out a little. And now you can see that Deadline marker, the green arrow there. If I hover over it Deadline task, Wedding day. Deadline Thursday, September 1st. Now that’s a purely visual marker. It won’t put a physical limitation. But clearly as we work further on the plan we need to try to make sure that the wedding day never moves to the right of that date. We’ve got quite a lot more to do on it yet so we don’t need to worry about it too much at the moment. And as I say if we do start to get a problem we will see an indicator in the I column to the left of the table.
So I have two other things to do in this section, both fairly quick things to show you. First of all I’m going to go into Options and you may recall on the Schedule page one of the options, Auto-schedule tasks scheduled On and we changed it to Project start date which is the setting that I usually use. But let me just change that to Current date, click on OK and insert another new task. Now if I look at the Constraints on that new task it doesn’t have an As soon as possible Constraint. It has a Start no earlier than Constraint of today which means as the constraint implies that that task cannot be scheduled by Project 2016 to start earlier than that date. So that’s an important distinction. I’m now going to Cancel that. I’m going to delete both of those new tasks. So right click, Delete, right click, Delete. And I just change that option back to the setting I prefer of project start date.
The second thing that I want to do here is to make quite a big change. Right near the beginning of the plan task ID 2, Agree budget and approach. In terms of project management itself quite often projects have phases. And probably the most likely phase with a wedding planning project would be that we’d start off by saying well, “How much money are we going to need to spend on this? What sort of level of spending are we looking at? And what will our approach be?” So for example, are we talking about a relatively small family wedding with maybe just immediate family, a dozen people, maybe twenty people? Or are we talking about a much grander affair with 200 or 300 guests and maybe even more than that attending the reception and entertainment in the evening?
Now really that particular task is a precursor to virtually everything else within the schedule. And sometimes when you’ve been looking at a plan for a while like this one you may decide actually I’m not 100% sure about that planning task at the beginning there because setting the wedding date and agree budget and approach are really two completely separate tasks. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to promote task 2, which I can do from the mini toolbar, and I’m also going to promote Set wedding date. And I’m going to remove that planning task which now no longer has if you like a life of its own or any function of its own. And then I’m going to make task 1 a predecessor of each of the summary tasks. So 3, Attire, its predecessor is 1. So what I’ve done is to go through and put task 1 as a predecessor on each of those other summary tasks. And this reflects the fact that as you get more and more detail and accuracy in a plan you may well want to restructure it. You may want to take everything from Attire onwards and put that inside a sort of super summary task which would make it much easier to represent the fact that everything in that task follows after the task with ID 1.
Something else you can do which often makes it easier to read a plan, to understand the structure of it. If I select task 3 on the Task Tab in the Insert Group on the Task button one of the options is Blank Row. And you can insert blank rows quite neatly into a project plan. And very often that emphasizes the structure of the plan.
Note also, let’s take this task here with ID 1. If I insert a blank row watch what happens to all of the predecessors in the predecessor column. That task is now task 2 and of course other task IDs are updated accordingly. But Project 2016 takes care of all of that for you.
That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
