Hello, I am a student of a project management course and I am working on my final project. I was hoping someone would help me with my problem.
I have a problem with my critical path it is not showing properly.I am using MS Project 2010. Monior and contol task is set up with fixed units. Since beging this task is in "red" color. I am sure that the problem is the Monitor and Control project task. It has zero total slack. When I link all work packages together my critical path includes just 3 tasks Plan Project - Monitor and Control Project - Close project. I tried to not to include the Monitor and Control Project and the critical path looks "normal".
If anyone could help me to find out what I am doing wrong I would really appreciated.
The key is to have the M&C task gain some slack - otherwise, it will be considered critical.
However, putting aside the tool usage, M&C activities will usually span the life of a project so rather than call them out as a separate phase, I've either detailed specific ones (e.g. team meetings) as individual recurring tasks, or have not indicated them on the schedule but estimated and added their costs to my budget separately.
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Question: Aren't those tasks you are talking about considered Level of Effort (LOE) tasks or Hammock Activities ?
If so, you should have the duration length of those tasks the same length of the critical path or the activities covered under them. It looks to me you are having a red flag because you are allowing those tasks to drive the critical path while they should not. LOE or Hammock Activities should never drive the CP. Saving Changes...
you don't directly add slack - slack is an outcome of the scheduling logic of your activities. If there is flexibility relative to those on the critical path, then that will be your slack...
So to add slack to activities with 0 slack, you need to modify your scheduling logic...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Agree with Kiron. Adding Float to the tasks manually will definitely give you an unrealistic and fake schedule. The slack is the outcome of the sequencing, logic and duration estimates for your tasks so you probably would want to take another look at the sequencing of your tasks. Saving Changes...
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