Читать книгу Microsoft Project For Dummies - Cynthia Dionisio Snyder, Cynthia Snyder Dionisio - Страница 34

One of the most valuable aspects offered by Project has traditionally been its ability to recalculate task schedules, such as when you change the project start date or there is a change to one task’s schedule that affects one or more dependent (linked) tasks. This powerful behavior saves the project manager — you — from having to rethink and reenter dates to rescheduled tasks throughout the project.

But flip sides to the benefits of automation always exist, and in the case of project scheduling, automatic scheduling can lead to unwanted schedule changes based on software behavior and not on human expertise.

To retain the helpful aspects of automation that make scheduling less time-consuming while allowing project managers to retain schedule control when needed, Project allows user-controlled scheduling.

In user-controlled scheduling, you can select one of these scheduling modes for each task:

 Auto Scheduled: Project calculates task schedules for you based on the project start date and finish date, task dependencies, calendar selections, and resource scheduling.

 Manually Scheduled: Project enables you to skip entering the duration and dates, and specify them later. When you enter the duration and dates, Project fixes the schedule for the task and doesn’t move it unless you do so manually. The manually scheduled tasks move if you reschedule the entire project, in most cases. The Gantt bars for manually scheduled tasks also differ in appearance from those for automatically scheduled tasks.

The indicator for auto-scheduled and manually scheduled tasks is at the bottom of the Project window. Figure 2-7 shows that the Walls tasks are auto-scheduled, as indicated by the time bar and the arrow in the Task Mode column. The Entry gates are manually scheduled as indicated by the pushpin in the Task Mode column. On the time scale, the auto-scheduled tasks show up as blue bars on your screen and the manually scheduled tasks show up as aqua bars with vertical lines on each end.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 2-7: Manually and automatically scheduled tasks.

When you indent a task, its parent task switches from manually scheduled to auto-scheduled because the duration and dependencies of the child tasks determine when the parent task can start and finish. Therefore, you don’t fill in the duration or start and finish dates for WBS elements — that information will auto-populate when you enter tasks beneath the WBS elements.

The project file can have all manually scheduled tasks or all auto-scheduled tasks — or any mix of the two. By default, all tasks that you create use the manually scheduled mode.

You can change the task mode for the overall project in two ways:

 To change the mode for all new tasks, select the Task tab, click the Mode icon in the Tasks group (the button with the calendar and a question mark), and then choose Auto Schedule or Manually Schedule from the menu, as shown in Figure 2-8.

 Another way to change the mode for all new tasks is to click the New Tasks link at the left end of the status bar at the bottom of the project, then select the mode you want.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 2-8: Changing the task mode from the Ribbon.

You can change the task mode for individual tasks in three ways:

 Select the task, click the Task tab on the Ribbon, and then click either Manually Schedule or Auto Schedule in the Tasks group.

 Select the task, click the Task Mode cell for the task, click the drop-down arrow that appears, and click either Manually Scheduled or Auto Scheduled in the drop-down list.

 Select the task, click the Task tab on the Ribbon, and click the Information button in the Properties group. On the General tab of the Task Information dialog box, go to the Schedule Mode area and click the Manually Scheduled radio button or the Auto Scheduled option button.

You need to balance the desires of your inner control freak versus the need to be an efficient project manager in determining how often to use manual scheduling. Though manual scheduling prevents Project from moving tasks that you want to stay put in the schedule, you may need to edit the schedules for dozens of dependent tasks in a long or complicated project. The best balance — particularly for beginning project managers — may be to use manual scheduling sparingly.