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‘Tis the season for brainstorming resolutions – and ways to stick to them. 🙋‍♀️🙋🏾 Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution to improve productivity. Resource Leveling: Scheduling vs.Get stories about tech and teams in your inbox Subscribe What’s the value of Schedule Risk Analysis?Īre You Using the Team Planner View Feature in Microsoft Project? Obviously, some items on this list may not be possible, but you can use it to build your own course of action to get the project “back in the black.” Consider asking for an extension of the project deadline.Are any tasks on the schedule there only arbitrarily? Can you eliminate them? Can you use partial constraints and not absolute constraints, such as “Must Start On”? Can sequential tasks have some overlap or run parallel to others? If Lag is in the schedule, can you remove it? What effect does it have? This could shorten task duration, which could be effective for Critical and Negative Slack tasks. Ask for more resources to be assigned on tasks where effort drives duration.Break long tasks into shorter tasks where possible.What possible solutions are available to get back on track?Īlthough not a complete list, here are some ideas to guide course correction: The responses and corrections made by the Project Manager should directly correspond with the amount and severity of the Negative Slack. Now that you can identify Negative Slack in the schedule, you should be able to manage it. Note: there are settings in Project that allow you to format tasks as Critical when the Slack is more than the default days, but this is a complexity not required for this discussion about Negative Slack.įigure 4 So, you understand what caused the problem. Since there are three days of Slack, none of the tasks are Critical. This means that Slack will show in the schedule and Critical Tasks will be formatted to red.

Additionally, the Critical Tasks and Slack check boxes in Format Tab > Bar Styles are checked. The milestone’s Must Finish Date constraint is far enough into the future that it imposes three days of Total Slack (Float) into the schedule. In Figure 1, all tasks and a constrained finish milestones are linked with finish-to-start dependencies. The figures below have been designed to illustrate the Negative Slack concept. What tools do we have in Microsoft Project to help identify Negative Slack, so we can manage it? Unfortunately, these are also common characteristics found in most projects. The causes of Negative Slack are the usual suspects named above: constraints, deadlines, dependencies, duration increases, and any number of errors in schedule assumptions. Think of it as the minimum amount of time to be made up in a schedule if it is to finish on time.

But, have you looked for Negative Slack? This is generally defined as the amount of time required to complete a task or project beyond its scheduled finish date. Much has been written about Critical Path, Slack, Constraints, and the various forms of Duration and Dependencies.

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