Optional/negotiable and Competing Tasks 1

[blink416]

Hello !

I'm wandering how would it be possible, if at all, to include tasks in a MS Project workflow that :

1) Are added-value / optional / negotiable tasks, meaning that doing these tasks would potentially provide extra value to the quality of the project, but their implementation is not an absolute requirement i.e. is there a way of telling Microsoft Project that this given task does not have to be executed by necessity and thus don't include it in critical path analysis and maybe shade it some way to distinguish it from other non-negotiable tasks etc ?

2) Are competing tasks ! i.e. to include in your strategy competing alternative tasks that achieve a similar end result but using a different approach, so that it is necessary to choose, which of the competing tasks to include in the strategy that is to be executed. It would be nice to highlight this somehow as well. And as a more advanced feature ask Project to automatically choose the competing tasks that overall yield the lowest cost, or lowest lapsed time or whatever other criterion specified.

The general issue here is to be able to work with alternative plans in MS Project and explicitly select best strategies by exploring all paths / tasks available. I haven't found a way to do that in Project, any suggestions ? If standard methods aren't available, what about plug-ins or writing VBA code ? I'm committed to Project mainly as it is well compatible with MS Outlook, which I use daily, but if Project can't handle optional and competing tasks, do You know of any alternative software that can - which would ideally work well with Outlook as well ?

Thanks for any comments in advance !

 

[PDQBach]

1. A project should only include the deliverables that are necessary for the successful completion of the project. Your 'value add' tasks aren't 'added value' they're scope creep or "gold plating" or "nice to have". If you really want to do them, issue a Change request and get the project sponsor to sign-off on it. If the project sponsor isn't willing to pay for it, why are you bothering to deliver/measure/track it?

2. Once again, if you have one deliverable, why are you tracking two different approaches? You might -- in fact, you almost certainly *ought* to -- have a task (at a quite early stage in the project) where the deliverable is to define two (or more) approaches and then have a decision point where one approach or the other is chosen. But if there is indecision between various choices then there is little point in putting detailed task estimates into your schedule because you are attempting to schedule and gain resource commitments for something that isn't going to happen.

In short, it seems to me that you are asking the tool to do something that the tool was never intended to do: manage your internal corporate project management processes.

If you really want to go down this path (and want to highlight unnecessary tasks and other wastes of time) then View | Gantt and use one of the Flag fields to indicate those tasks and then Format | Bar Styles to change the Gantt chart display of those tasks. For extra work, you could create a filter that highlights those tasks and then Format | Text Styles to display filtered tasks in a special colour (note that this special colour applies to all instances where a filter Highlight is chosen) and not just this specific case.

 

[blink416]

Thanks for the comments PDQBach, I tried the highlighting and it works very well. This solves the formatting problem, leaving the way in which I would like Project to operate on these optional tasks unresolved e.g. Project still includes these optional tasks in critical path analysis thus not reflecting the negotiability of these tasks ?

On the whole - and this encompassing the need for both competing and optional tasks - I may indeed be looking for a tool that can manage internal corporate project management processes, any suggestions for (alternative) software that focuses on this strategy development aspect ? (comments on the compatibility of any candidates with Office Outlook would be most appreciated as well)

My primary aim is to use the tool for scientific research in which the crux of most issues in the planning stage lies not so much on specific resource allocations and scheduling etc, but on choosing which strategy / tasks to execute in order to have a decent chance for success. Developing a drug for treatment of cancer for example, there are billions of paths to follow, most of which are cul-de-sacs and in order to deliver I believe one has to very carefully explore all the options (tasks and strategies involved) and make a realistic choice as to which path to spend your life trying to pursue. For that reason, I'm looking for software solutions to visualize this landscape of possibilities and ideally for software that includes features to help make rational choices as to which of the alternative strategies to commit to. And the multitude of competing strategies often arise from divergence of tasks at both a global / macro level as well as at a more local / micro level within the overall plan. I hope this clarifies the niche of interest.


P.S. Is there any way of bringing in branching links (arrows) between the tasks in Project (like in Microsoft Visio for instance) to visualize tasks that compete with each other by having all the arrows from all the competing tasks join a common point from which a single arrow connects to the output task ...

 

[PDQBach]

For operations ... sorry, there is no way that I know of to get project to ignore tasks when calculating the critical path. In fact, it's the opposite: by increasing (from 0) the amount of slack that Project checks, you can increase the number of tasks that appear on the critical path.

The field "Critical" cannot, fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your point of view), be edited.

For project control processes, there are a variety of methodologies out there (I'm familiar with Macroscope and a couple of others but not enough to comment -- let alone recommend!).

Since your primary objective seems to be diagraming rather than project controlling at this point in your "project" (which really seems to be a survey of approaches rather than tracking progress on one of them) then it seems that the best software for your purpose is going to be a diagraming package (you did mention Visio). As I've said here many times: Project is great for tracking and awful for making pretty diagrams; Visio is great for pretty diagrams but awful for tracking.

In short, I think others here will have to come up with their insights to help you.

 

[blink416]

Thanks a lot !

On second thought, my aim is more than diagramming and that is why I'm not simply sticking with Visio. Although visualization is a necessary step in the process, selecting best strategies should involve comparing alternatives for their cost, time, resources and quality involved, and then trying to find an optimal solution by weighting those criteria. I think I'm therefore looking for an amalgam of Visio and Project, to be able to first set up the alternative strategies - visually as well as operationally with competing and optional (sets of) tasks - and then estimate cost, time, resources and quality for the tasks to explicitly use these criteria to choose exactly what is the best route forward. Ideally I'd be able to ask Project or some other software to highlight / choose the strategy with minimal cost and with another click of the button with minimal time requirements or with highest quality estimates ignoring other criteria, or even better assign relative weights to the criteria and choose the best strategy accordingly. I'd be most grateful for any suggestions on how to achieve that ? Is trying to do this with Project too much effort ? Are there alternatives that work well with Outlook ?

Again, thanks a lot PDQBach !

 

[blink416]

Any suggestions please ???

 

[samaba]

How about the PERT anaylsis in Project?