Critical Path and User-controlled Scheduling

Quick reference

• 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.

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