Have tasks going beyond the Project End date and not be Critical Path

[CornishPlanner]

Hi Guys I am new and hoping you can help. I have a scenario where we have been asked by the client to price for extra works so we are also obliged to enter them into the programme. Unfortunately they go beyond the end of the current critical path and the end date of the project. As they are separate items that will not effect the contractual completion I have not linked them in anyway to the project end task however Project seems to mark any task that has a completion later than the end date as critical path and this also removes the critical path from the current position. I am aware you can also show CP's by adding days to the also show critical with X days slack but this will not remove the additional tasks from the CP. Any ideas? I don not wish to show these tasks on an additional programme and worst case scenario I will manually colour the tasks or increase the slack period and colour the new CP blue. I hope this ,makes sense and I am using 2003 cheers Alex

 

[JulieInMaine]

Hello Alex,

Sorry, but you cannot include tasks in a project plan and have them not "count" towards critical path calculations.

The best I can suggest is to create two project plans -- one showing the original project plan and another project file with just the extra work. Set the start date of the second project equal to the end date of the first.

If needed you can consolidate the two projects and still calculate a separate critical path for each plan.

I hope this helps.
Julie

 

[PDQBach]

Julie is quite correct for P2003 through P2007.

In P2010 MSPrj introduced the concept of Active and Inactive tasks. This is a way of taking tasks "out of the picture" without actually having to delete them.

In P2010, I created some "after the project ends" tasks and they behaved just as Julie describes. But, when I marked them as "inactive" (technically, I set Active to "no") then they didn't appear in critical path even though they were.

But ... and it's a big BUT: everything about them gets ignored so any costs, any resource allocations (or overallocations), etc., are simply not included in Project's numbers.

I suppose you could create all the additional tasks, see what the costing and allocation impacts are and then flag the additional tasks as inactive.

In order to do this you will, of course, have to upgrade to Prj2010 and anyone you share files with will have to do the same since saving your file back to Prj2003 format will drop anything (like Active/NotActive tasks) that is only available in P2010.

 

[CornishPlanner]

Thank you guys very much, As it happens PDQBatch your info was very salient as my boss has recently upgraded me to 2010 so that's a real help and Julie thanks for the tip that would definitely have been a good way around it although potentially onerous. Its also really nice to have people agree with my issue rather than a silly option somewhere that I had omitted. Cheers Guys Alex