Question on calculations

Hello!

Using MS Project Standard 2002

2 Scenarios:

Scenario 1

Project Calendar: Standard

The following are Task No, duration, start, finish, predecessor values

1 "0 hrs" "Mon 9/24/07 9:00 PM" "Mon 9/24/07 9:00 PM"

2 "30 mins" "Mon 9/24/07 4:15 PM" "Mon 9/24/07 4:45 PM" "1FF-15 mins"

3 "8 hrs" "Fri 9/28/07 8:00 AM" "Fri 9/28/07 5:00 PM"

4 "2 hrs" "Wed 9/26/07 8:00 AM" "Wed 9/26/07 10:00 AM" "3FS-3 days"

Addl details

No resources yet assigned to any tasks

Task 1 has start no earlier than, 24h calendar selected

Task 2 has 24h calendar selected, ASAP

Task 3 has start no earlier than, calendar is NONE

Task 4 has ASAP, calendar NONE

Tasks 1 and 2 are supposed to 24h tasks; Tasks 3 and 4 are supposed to standard tasks (8am to 5pm)

Comments on this scenario

Task 4 is showing as I had expected given the FS relationship.

However Task 2 is not.

Task 1 finishes at 9pm. Given the FF rel on task 2, I would expect it would show task 2 starting at 8:15pm and ending at 8:45pm given the 1ff-15 relationship (finishing 15min before task 1 ends). However, as you can see, the start/end times are not even close.

Thinking this was calendar related, I changed the Project Calendar to 24h instead of Standard. Thinking that the 24h calendar would cause probs for tasks 3 and 4 (given they had NONE specified as calendar before), I changed the calendar for those two tasks to Standard.

Here are results:

1 "0 hrs" "Mon 9/24/07 9:00 PM" "Mon 9/24/07 9:00 PM"

2 "30 mins" "Mon 9/24/07 8:15 PM" "Mon 9/24/07 8:45 PM" "1FF-15 mins"

3 "8 hrs" "Fri 9/28/07 8:00 AM" "Fri 9/28/07 5:00 PM"

4 "2 hrs" "Fri 9/28/07 8:00 AM" "Fri 9/28/07 10:00 AM" "3FS-3 days"

Comments

As you can see, Task 2 is now showing as expected - good! However, Task 4 is now showing as starting on 9/28, not 9/26 as I hoped. No doubt, this is because of the 24h project calendar. I thought using the standard calendar for tasks 3 and 4 would take care of this but obviously not.

I have several tasks that are the "8 to 5" kinds of tasks that will have dependencies like...2weeks before a task ends, 3d before a task ends,etc. I would like to preserve these relationships without having to tweak the FS relationship on the standard tasks (e.g. 3FS-9 days) so that you can’t even tell what the original intent was (3FS-3d).

Any ideas you have will be very much appreciated.

Thanks...Phil



Given the different kinds of tasks I have in this plan (some 8 to 5, some 24h), do you have some suggestions on what I can try?