Just as we've asked our team to estimate the tasks in our project and
the duration in our project,
we also need to ask them to tell us how all these tasks link together.
Now, as you can see in the Gantt chart graphical view,
all these tasks right now start at the same exact time.
What we want to do is have these be pushed out based on a predecessor
relationship for the tasks.
Now, I mentioned before that Microsoft Project uses constraints in
order to schedule tasks.
Well, there is actually a feature in Project called Constraints as well.
So for example, if I want this task to start on 11/2/2015,
I can go ahead and type that.
And what's happened is Microsoft Project created this thing called the constraint.
You can see that in the indicator column over here on the left side of
the screen it says this task has a start no earlier than constraint.
Changing this date here is essentially the equivalent of just
trying to manage your project in Excel, where you're just typing dates and
trying to make sure that things line up.
We do not want to use that.
So I'm going to do a Ctrl+Z or Undo and remove that constraint date.
We want Project to calculate the dates for
us based on the predecessor column, and we start linking the tasks.
Now, task number one is actually the start of the project, so
we don't need to link that one.
We do want to link task number two to task number one.
Why is that?
Because when we create this architectural design,
we're rarely not doing that until we know we have the land.
I'm not going to pay engineers to do that work until I actually have the land
acquired.
So I'll go ahead and type 1.
And then these progressively go down in a kind of waterfall fashion,
where we're linking all of the tasks.
And you can see this on the Gantt chart.
You can see now that tasks are being moved out based on
the linkage to the tasks and the duration that the tasks have.
Now, there's times when you don't just want to link tasks one after the other.
For example, if I come here to install cabling, I link to that.
But there's no reason for why we can't install cabling and
plumbing at the same time.
So I'll type 8ss.
And what that's done is it's created a predecessor relationship
to install cabling.
And the ss means start to start.
So if you take a look here on the Gantt chart,
basically these two tasks are going to happen at the same time.
Now, if task line seven changes, if the duration changes, I'll go ahead and
just do this real quick, change it from 15 days to 20 days.
Watch what happens over on the Gantt chart.
The tasks move out, but they're still happening at the same time.
I'm going to undo that change, so task seven still is at 15 days.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and finish linking these tasks.
But before we review those, I want to just point out a few things.
Not all our tasks happened in a perfect sequence.
For example, this hire interior designer.
But we can be looking for
that interior designer while work is being done on the house.
Probably makes sense after that install house frame task is done to find
ourselves the interior designer.
So you can see on the Gantt chart how that lines up differently than the other
tasks surrounding it.
You might want to move hire interior designer up, but it kind of makes sense to
have that interior designer with other tasks around it.
So we'll leave that task where it belongs.
Now, we are trying to create a critical path.
And this critical path is defining the list of tasks that perform the longest
sequence from beginning to end of the project.
We can't do that if all of our tasks aren't properly linked.
Now, there's a few ways to decide whether all these tasks are linked.
One way is to quickly look at the Gantt chart.
As you can see, this task doesn't seem to be attached to anything.
There's another way I can do that.
If I right-click on the Start column and choose Insert Column,
I can start typing the word successors.
And what you can see is that there is a successors column.
And if I press the Enter key on my keyboard,
what's happening is Microsoft Project automatically filled out this field for
us as we were entering the predecessors.
And one of the easiest ways to find missing tasks that are unlinked
is to come through here and look down the predecessors and
then look back up the successors.
And you can see there's blank lines.
Now, there's a way I personally like to link these tasks up, and
that's to use the network diagram.
l will cover linking these tasks together with a network diagram in the next lesson.
If you happen to be using Project 2019 or Project Online,
you might have noticed this little pick list item here.
If you click it, you'll see that you can actually select multiple tasks
without having to type them.
Now it's easy as selecting a few tasks and
then just clicking the pick list item there, and it updates.
You can do that with successors, too.
So this is a minor enhancement you can enjoy if you're using Project Online or
Microsoft Project 2019.
Because this was just a demonstration exercise,
I'm going to undo all of my changes that I made here so
that you can continue with the course.