Your needs are fairly complex, and I know for sure that they could be solved with a Visual Basic for Applications extension to MS Project. Figuring out the code is too complex to post here, and I would recommend against it. I think you can do a lot of things with the built-in formatting features of MS Project, and create a nearly-perfect view with a lot less work.

To solve this problem, you will need to become VERY familiar with the custom formatting dialog box for the Gantt chart view. This dialog box lets you set the colors, bar styles, and other settings for a Gantt chart. Every “view” in MS Project has different settings, and I recommend exploring the dialog box for any of the built-in views that are close to what you want.

I am going to break your problem into parts, and suggest some possible solutions using bar styles. Experiment with these to see which ones best meet your needs. I think you will use a combination of these to solve your problem.

You mention having a green bar if a task is early, and a red one if the task is late. Create two special bar styles, one colored red, and one colored green. The green one will show the number of days AHEAD of schedule that the task is, and the red one will show the number of days BEHIND schedule the task is. Several of the built-in views show the schedule in relation to the baseline. Other views highlight the critical path tasks in red; these views will give you a good example of how to show different colors, depending on a conditional formula. Use these as a model for the new bars for your tasks.

A more difficult problem is to show these values ONLY for the task that is late, and NOT for the tasks that get pushed earlier or later. Most of the built-in views compare the planned start/finish to the baseline start/finish, so any variance in an early task creates a visible variance in all the tasks that follow.

I recommend that you use the planned vs. baseline DURATION instead of the start/finish dates. If you display the difference between the planned vs. baseline duration on the Gantt chart, then you will show that bar ONLY for the tasks that are causing the variance, and not the tasks that have just been pushed backwards or forwards by their predecessors.

Exactly how to best display these values is up to you. There are hundreds of combinations of color, position, text, pattern, and other variables available to you. You might want to create some custom fields to help drive your new view. A custom field can contain the results of a formula, like “baseline duration – planned duration”, and it might help you draw the chart that you want to display. If your chart requires custom calculations, I suggest creating a view and a table that displays these custom fields. People always ask, “What does that bar mean?” when you create a custom view. Having the number appear right on the chart will help people understand the graphical view.

Finally, be sure to create a new, custom-named view before you start experimenting. Copy the built-in view that is closest to what you need, but do not start changing that built-in view. I have forgotten to create a custom view sometimes, and it always causes problems later. Inevitably I eventually decide that I need the built-in view also, and then I must copy views back and forth. Do all your experiments on a custom view, and save yourself the time and rework.

I hope this helps.

–Alex

I have set up a project timeline with all of the events I need. For simplicity we’ll say they are all linked in series to the task before them. What I am looking to be able to do is see how accurate the dates and durations I scheduled are. What I would like is if it takes 3 days longer then predicted to do task A, then there would be a little 3 day red extension on the timeline. If it finishes 3 days early, there would be a green part of the line. I am hoping to get the subsequent tasks to move accordingly. What I have now is a comparison of every task to a baseline. When a task takes longer than predicted, it shows the comparison. However, it compares the other tasks to when they were supposed to have started too. I would only really like to see when they will start and finish based on the new timing and only have the early or late task compared. Any thoughts?

If you wanted to, you could create a VB application or macro that uses some kind of a rule to decide which resource to assign. That would be complex, though. I recommend getting a VBA-experienced programmer, who also knows MS Project, if you decide to do that.

Personally, I just make multiple passes through the schedule, substituting resources, to figure out the best solution to the problem. Usually if you first level your most critical, skilled people, then fill in the remaining work with the available people, you should be able to get the best outcome.

You might even want to continue to assign multiple resources to each task, but then mark the work as 0% for one and 100% for the other. Having the resource assigned at 0% would be a reminder that the resource is qualified to complete the task. Then, when you fix the resource leveling each time you update the project plan, you can change the actual work assignments quickly and easily.

A final suggestion is to use “resource pools” instead of individual resources. For instance, if you have a single resource “programmers”, which represents 5 programmers, then you do not need to worry about which programmer is assigned. Just assign the “programmer” resource at 100% to each task as needed, and you can assign the actual programmer later. This “programmers” resource should have a max units setting of 500%, because there are 5 people available.

I hope one of these solutions works for you.

–Alex

I want the ability to assign multiple resources to a task (for scheduling purposes). Then, when I resource-level the project, I want Project 2003 to only select a single resource for the task. Currently, Project is assigning the tasks to all the resources. Is it possible for Project to only select a single resource to finish a task from start to finish?

I am glad you experimented with the Options/Calendar settings. It sounds like you understand them completely now. The “hours per day” does not actually change the start and end date on the tasks. It just changes the displayed number of days in the “duration” column and in other areas.

Your sample “five day” task has four eight-hour days (Mon to Thu), then a four-hour Friday, for a total of 36 hours for the week and for the task. If you enter “8″ as the hours in a day, then MS Project will show that as a 4.5 day task.

You could enter “7.2″ as the number of hours in a day, and then MS Project would call this a 5-day task. I do not recommend doing so, because it will also turn a full-day task on Monday into a 1.11 day task.

In short, there is no way to fix your problem with these settings.

The only possible solution I can imagine is to create a custom formula. Use a user-defined column, and build a formula that calculates the value that you want to show. If you want to ignore holidays, give special treatment for Fridays, and other special processing, the formula could be quite complex. If you just want to know the number of elapsed days between the start and finish date, though, that is a simple calculation (difference between start and end date, rounded off to the nearest day). This formula (end date minus start date) should give you the calendar-days metric that you were asking for.

–Alex

I have a question on how the [hours per day] setting in the [Options/Calendar] and work time calendar works. I will explain my problem by an example.
Suppose I have a Calendar where from Monday to Thursday I have a 8 day schedule(8.00AM-12.00PM and 1.00PM-5.00PM) and on Friday I have a 4 day schedule(8.00AM-12.00PM). Also I have a task starting from a Monday(Mon 4/6/09) and ends on the Friday of the same week(Fri 4/10/09). So logically my duration should be 5 days. But depending on the setting [hours per day] the duration gets recalculated every time I change it. I think this setting can never have a general value in a case like mine. Is there any other way I can ignore this value and use the Calendar days instead?
Thanks you!
\Sri

The best thing about PMI and the PMBOK Guide is the fact that it gives us project managers a common language. When writing an article like this one, I can use language that will make sense to other PMI members, even if we have very different practices and word use in our own companies and industries.

–Alex

Most of the time we do not really care about the schedule down to that level of detail. You have a few different options:

1. Decide that you are just scheduling at a weekly level. Ignore the fact that the task stretches for an entire week. You know it will really be done on one particular day, but do not let duration listed in MS Project bother you.

2. If the task MUST be done on a particular day, then schedule it as a 100% or higher assignment for that particular day. MS Project will flag the day as an overallocation, but ignore the warning and schedule it that way anyway.

3. Use the options in the “Resource Leveling” dialog box. Change the “Look for overallocations” option from the default “day-by-day” to a “week-by-week” basis. MS Project will still flag the resource as overallocated in some views, but it will ignore the overallocation in others.

4. Increase the “max units” for this resource to 100% or higher, but then manually level the work load for that resource to a lower level. This will eliminate the overallocation warnings, but it requires that you manually set a lower work load for every other task.

5. Set a variable work-unit schedule for your resource. Allow them to work 100% or higher for a particular day, but drop their availability down to 20% or lower for the rest of the project. You can do this either by specifying a variable availability percentage in the resource view, or by setting different working hours in the work calendar for this resource.

DO NOT change the settings in both places, or your problem will start multiplying. For instance, if I set a resource to be available to work ONLY between 8 am and 10 am every day in the calendar, and then assign them a maximum unit amount of 25%, I will wind up having them spend only 25% of 2 hours per day on my project.

Personally, I usually wind up manually scheduling a particular date as an overallocation, and then ignoring the warnings from MS Project (#2). If the end-date is really not important, I just ignore the issue entirely (#1).