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Reverse engineering a project Richard Harold Chippenham, Eng, United Kingdom This is a strange request, and one I have not needed to do before. An external provider has submitted to a client a proposal. This contains a high level resource schedule (number and type of resource by month), along with a budget for the total job, although I had no detail on the tasks and activities assigned to the months. What they have asked is for me to create a schedule in MS Project, aligned to the resource schedule numbers, by month, in the proposal.  Ordinarily, I would get a breakdown of the tasks, the estimates, the sequencing and run some basic resource levelling.  In this instance I am creating a schedule (500-600 rows of key activities and deliverables), which has fixed timeframes, and drive the schedule from this. Here I am being asked to align the schedule to  proposal resource profile, as a baseline. To achieve this initial view I have created a schedule, with key roles and assigned them, although. have to change the % allocation to the tasks to smooth and make the resource profile fit.  I don't think anything exists (as this is not a normal approach) although I wanted to see if anyone had been presented with this challenge before and how they approached it; unless the line by line approach is the only way to get the initial view of this. Thanks! Saving Changes... Posted: Apr 3, 2024 1:12 PM

Sort By: Newest First Chronological Votes Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada Richard - This is definitely a weird way to do things - the challenge I see is that when you force activity durations to resource allocations, the schedule is not based on a network diagram and won't benefit from critical path method so you will lose a number of the advantages of the normal approach. This will definitely be a concern if the individual activities are highly inter-dependent (from a logical, not resource utilization perspective). Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any tool which can help in this regard - it might be easier to just come up with a backlog of activities, dates & resources allocated rather than a Gantt chart-based schedule. Kiron Saving Changes... Posted: Apr 3, 2024 5:24 PM Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, USA I think your approach of building the schedule and then adjusting it where it doesn't fit the staffing plan is logical. The problem I see however is that you can't start many tasks early so you will wind up with idle resources that you can't shift to a later time when you actually need them. That will most likely push your completion date out to the right. Saving Changes... Posted: Apr 3, 2024 5:57 PM Richard Harold Chippenham, Eng, United Kingdom Thanks both - this is the first time I have had an ask like this, and just thought I would check if I am missing a novel tool or approach. I believe this is based on a commercial / presentation approach, although will store up problems later on if the schedule is engineered this way. Saving Changes... Posted: Apr 4, 2024 4:26 AM Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina The answer to your question is taking a look to Barry Boehm "Cone of Uncertainty". Check into the internet about the paper and works done by Steve McConnel in the same topic. While you will find that it was intended for initiatives where the key component is software the Cone was taken but lot of other domains including it refences in past versions of the PMBOK. Saving Changes... Posted: Apr 4, 2024 6:02 AM

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