As Late As Possible

Anyone?

Stuart,
if possible I would set the successor as Finish No Later Than its current finish date; the as Late As Possible predecessor would be restrained to move the successor forward.
I cannot think of any othet way to achieve what you want with MS (blah) Project
Alexandre

If Im reading this right you have the following:

Task A is linked Finish to Start with Task B (with B being the successor to A) and you want the finish date for A to be driven by the Start date of B meaning you want the finish of A to go until A starts. Is that right?

If it is then try using a Start to Finish link with B as the predecessor and A the successor and forget about constraints as the way to rig the relationship.

I know it sounds strange but your situation is the only time this kind of link makes any sense. The example that always works is when B is "Exam Date" and A is "Study for exam". This kind of link sets it up so that if the exam moves then the studying moves with it.

It might work.

Brian Kennemer

Alex,

Thanks for your reply. As I need to progress this project regularly, I do no want to impose artificial constraints on any tasks that may make them critical when they are not.


Brian,

Once again, thanks.

Your assumptions are correct; you understand what I am trying to do. Every other bit of software I have used does not push succeeding task like this.

I will try your suggestion and hope nobody who understands planning see the start to finish link.

Thank you both

Stuart

Why would you hope that nobody sees it? It is exactly what you want. You want the start of one task to determine the finish of another. You dont really want it as late as possible because doing so could push the start of the other task. You want the start of the one task to be what it is and for it to determine the finish of the other task.

I dont understand why you feel you would need to hide this.

Brian,

Please do not take offence. I was trained with the assumption that a ’start-finish’ link does not exist - logically; and never to use it. I HAVE in fact used your suggestion in this instance.

Thanks,

Stuart

Yaa stuart, u r correct in stating that, one should not use start-finish link.

However, these links become important, in case ur successors dates are freezed. Like last activtity is opening museum on a particular day or better example will be OPENING CEREMONY of FOOTBALL GROUND.

Here the dates are freezed. Hope, this should solve ur problem.

Cheers,

Ravi

No offense taken at all. I was just puzzled by the idea that it would need to be hidden. :-)

Re-Opening this post...
I am trying to get a set of tag along activities in MSP, as a specific example I am placing a PO as soon as it is authorised, but dont want the contractor to mobilise until just before the actual work needs to be done, a month or 2 later.









Any suggestions?

Guess I should have added some description for the pictures...

1: Regular schedule
2: Adding a start as late as possible which pushes successors also, which is not what I am looking for.
3: Taking off the ALAP, and using a SF relationship which appears to be fine untill...
4: impact of a late predecessor to a SF relationship, no good.

Bryan,

Try in your regular schedule to add in a dummy milestone which has “ggg” with FS as predecessor and “fff” with SF + “hhh” with FS as successors. This will cause “jj” (and then “kkk”+”ll”) to move when “eee” is delayed.

Hope it helps.

Regards,

Bo

...and "fff" to start as late as possible as you were looking for.

Actually it works with fff to start as soon as possible - at least in this very simple schedule. Unless I am missing something...

The other posts that talk about setting a calculated start and finish would not take the resources along with it I dont think.

I will let you know how I get along in my working schedule.

Thank you Bo.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Maybe the following link can give you a clue to what you are looking for.

http://www.htcprojectcontrols.com/TTB2004-2.pdf

Best regards,
Rafael

Thank you for the offering... all solutions come at a price, unfortunatly the example at HTC dosnt actually work once you add in a delayed predecessor.

To make the SF version work, you have to add in a FS +xDays from the submittal activity to the installation activity, where x is the duration of your delivery act - too much to synchronise.

The SS -15Days simply dosnt work once you delay the submittal activity.

Bo’s solution works, although the price is a dummy milestone to explain away, I set the Format, Bar to no symbol, no text and the table text to white so it dissapears - an additional price of remembering it it there! (hiding is not recommended).

Bryan,

Sorry for not being clear. I didn’t mean that "fff" should be set to ALAP, but that the solution would cause "fff" to start as late as possible (or JIT). "fff" should be set to ASAP.

If the milestone has a wording like "Completion of ggg" or similar I don’t think it should be that difficult to explain, i.e. no reason to hide, as it is logic that "hhh" can’t start before "ggg" finishes. You already had the FS link between "ggg" and "hhh" initially so basically it is the same.

Anyway, I still haven’t figured out what to do in MSP if you have more than one "JIT"-activity, e.g. if "ddd" was SF’ed to "eee", which again was SF’ed to "fff" and then to "hhh". However, as I keep 99,9% of activities ASAP and rarely, if not to say "never", use the SF-link, I won’t spent that much time thinking over it.

But, admitted, it is an error in MSP that it can’t handle this JIT or ALAP correctly.


Regards,

Bo