MS Project : Best Practices – #1

Avoid manually setting the start and finish dates for a task.

If you are doing so, then you are downgrading a plan created in MS Project to a plan maintained using Excel. The tool provides auto scheduling which could be due to dependencies , change in duration or change in effort. When a date is manually entered, auto update of timelines doesn’t
happen.

A best practice is to always define milestones. For eg: Your project will have a start date. Avoid keying in the start date manually to the first task in your plan. It’s advised to create a dummy milestone and manually enter the start date to that. And to your first task, set a dependency to this dummy start task.
It’s also a good practice to create a dummy start task as the first task in the list of tasks under a phase / module that’s defined in the project.

See Also : More articles on MS Project

 

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