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Critical Path and User-controlled Scheduling

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About this lesson

Microsoft Project calculates the critical path by way of looking at how all tasks connect with their predecessor/successor relationships. User-controlled scheduling can effectively break the ability to identify the critical path because durations, start dates, and finish dates are not required when using this feature.

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2013, 2019/365.

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Critical Path and User-controlled Scheduling.mpp.mpp
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Critical Path and User-controlled Scheduling - Completed.mpp.mpp
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Quick reference

Critical Path and User-controlled Scheduling

The critical path represents the tasks that will take the longest time to complete the project. You can also think of the critical path as the shortest amount of time the project can possibly be done.

If one critical task takes just one extra day to complete, the entire project will take an extra day to complete. Conversely, if a critical task takes one less day to complete, then the project will take one less day to complete.

User-controlled scheduling

Microsoft Project calculates the critical path by way of looking at how all tasks connect with their predecessor/successor relationships. User-controlled scheduling can effectively break the ability to identify the critical path because durations, start dates, and finish dates are not required when using this feature.

A best practice is to turn off user-controlled scheduling. In a future lesson, you will learn how to disable this feature for all future projects you create.

Steps

To determine if a task is using user-controlled scheduling, follow these steps:

  • Go to the Gantt chart view.
  • If you do not see it, insert the task mode column.

If the task is set to manually scheduled, then you are using user-controlled scheduling. Since it is a best practice to avoid using this feature, you can change the task to auto scheduled.

To easily view tasks that are in the critical path, follow these steps:

  • Go to the Gantt chart view.
  • Click the Gantt chart tools Format contextual tab.
  • Select the critical tasks checkbox.

The visual Gantt chart view at the right of the page will show critical tasks in red.

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  • 00:04 Now that you understand Microsoft Project uses a constraint based scheduling engine.
  • 00:11 I'm going to talk a little bit about two more topics.
  • 00:13 One is the critical path and the other is user controlled scheduling.
  • 00:20 First, let's talk about the critical path.
  • 00:21 As you recall, I created a project where I purchase a car, but
  • 00:26 actually this project is to plan a trip.
  • 00:30 And part of planning that trip is purchasing a new car.
  • 00:34 So here we're researching car models, purchasing the car and so on.
  • 00:38 But we're also planning the road trip, purchasing hotels,
  • 00:41 starting that road trip, hiking a mountain and returning home.
  • 00:45 These are all new tasks that I added.
  • 00:47 You can see here that with the predecessor column, I actually related
  • 00:52 this planning the trip back to task number one, researching car models.
  • 00:57 So once I'm done researching car models, I can also plan the road trip.
  • 01:01 And you can see that represented on the right side in the Gantt chart.
  • 01:05 You can see now that tasks aren't just flowing in what we call a waterfall
  • 01:09 method.
  • 01:09 You can actually see that many things are happening at the same time.
  • 01:14 What do I mean by waterfall method?
  • 01:17 Well imagine this first task is the river and
  • 01:20 then that river is falling off a cliff.
  • 01:22 You can see that there's a waterfall that's occurring with the tasks going down
  • 01:27 from left to right.
  • 01:28 So now we have other tasks that are happening at the same time.
  • 01:32 So one of the things that we might want to know is what are the tasks that
  • 01:37 are critical in this project?
  • 01:39 And the critical path essentially represents the longest path from
  • 01:44 the beginning of the project to the end of the project.
  • 01:48 So I'm going to show you how to look at the critical path right now.
  • 01:52 Click the Format tab under Gantt Chart Tools and
  • 01:56 then choose Critical Tasks in the bar style section.
  • 02:01 And what you can see here is all of these tasks have highlighted in red.
  • 02:06 Now, since this is the longest path in the project, any one of these tasks,
  • 02:11 if they move out just even one day, the entire project moves out one day.
  • 02:17 So let me just show you that real quick.
  • 02:20 If I change this task here, which is critical,
  • 02:23 from start road trip from three days to four days,
  • 02:27 you'll watch this task right here in task ten, the finish date.
  • 02:32 See how it's moved out to six, five.
  • 02:36 That's because the task is critical.
  • 02:39 I'm going to undo that change.
  • 02:42 Now one of the features in Microsoft Project is to use what's called
  • 02:47 manual scheduling or user-controlled scheduling.
  • 02:51 So if I come over here to Purchase Hotels and
  • 02:54 set this to Manually Scheduled, and I'll do this to all of the tasks.
  • 03:00 Not much has really changed in our project.
  • 03:03 However, I can do things like this, I can come over to the duration.
  • 03:08 Instead of typing one day, I could type soon, exclamation mark.
  • 03:13 And look what happened over here to the Gantt chart.
  • 03:16 You can see that now there's just this open bracket.
  • 03:21 And another thing I could do is maybe say that instead
  • 03:26 of this task finishing on six, one, I want it to finish on six, eight.
  • 03:33 And now what you can see is Microsoft Project is actually changing
  • 03:37 the Gantt chart.
  • 03:38 And it's not really maintaining the critical path
  • 03:42 relationship with that the scheduling engine normally keeps.
  • 03:47 And that's because we're using user-controlled scheduling.
  • 03:50 So I typically recommend that you turn this feature off.
  • 03:54 And future lessons, I'll talk a little bit about why you might use this.
  • 03:59 But for the most part, it's not really a feature that I recommend you use.
  • 04:03 So I'll put this back to auto-scheduling.
  • 04:05 And you can see Microsoft Project is now calculating the critical path for
  • 04:10 me again.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Constraint Based Scheduling
06m:09s
Configure Project Options
05m:54s

PMI, PMP, CAPM and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

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