Critical Path and User-controlled Scheduling

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now that you understand Microsoft project uses a constraint based scheduling engine,
• 00:10 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.
• 00:22 As you recall, I created a project where I purchase a car.
• 00:26 But actually this project is to plan a trip, and
• 00:30 part of planning that trip is purchasing a new car.
• 00:34 So here we're researching car models, purchasing the car, and so
• 00:37 on, 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.
• 00:48 You can see here that with the predecessor column, I actually related this planning
• 00:53 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.
• 01:06 You can see now that tasks aren't just flowing
• 01:09 in what we call a waterfall method.
• 01:12 You can actually see that many things are happening at the same time.
• 01:16 What do I mean by waterfall method?
• 01:18 Well imagine this first task is the river, and
• 01:22 then that river is falling off a cliff.
• 01:24 You can see that there's a waterfall that's occurring
• 01:27 with the tasks going down from left to right.
• 01:30 So now we have other tasks that are happening at the same time.
• 01:35 So one of the things that we might wanna know is
• 01:37 what are the tasks that are critical in this project?
• 01:41 And the critical path essentially represents the longest path
• 01:46 from the beginning of the project to the end of the project.
• 01:50 So I'm going to show you how to look at the critical path right now.
• 01:54 Click the Format tab under Gantt chart tools, and
• 01:58 then choose critical tasks in the Bar Style section.
• 02:04 And what you can see here is all of these tasks are highlighted in red.
• 02:09 Now since this is the longest path in the project, any one of these tasks,
• 02:14 if they move out just even one day, the entire project moves out one day.
• 02:19 So let me just show you that real quick.
• 02:21 If I change this task here, which is critical,
• 02:25 from start road trip from three days to four days,
• 02:29 you'll watch this task right here in task ten, the finish date.
• 02:35 See how it's moved out to 6/5, that's because the task is critical.
• 02:41 I'm going to undo that change.
• 02:44 Now, one of the features in Microsoft Project is to use what's called
• 02:49 manual scheduling or user controlled scheduling.
• 02:53 So if I come over here to purchase hotels and set this to manually scheduled,
• 02:59 and I'll do this to all of the tasks, not much has really changed in our project.
• 03:06 However, I can do things like this.
• 03:08 I can come over to the duration, instead of typing one day,
• 03:12 I could type soon, exclamation mark.
• 03:16 And look what happened over here to the Gantt chart.
• 03:18 You can see that now there's just this open bracket.
• 03:22 And another thing I could do is maybe say that instead of this
• 03:29 task finishing on 6/1, I want it to finish on 6/8.
• 03:35 And now what you can see is Microsoft Project is actually changing
• 03:39 the Gantt chart, and it's not really maintaining the critical
• 03:43 path relationship that the scheduling engine normally keeps.
• 03:48 And that's because we're using user controlled scheduling, so
• 03:52 I typically recommend that you turn this feature off.
• 03:55 In future lessons, I'll talk about why you might use this.
• 04:00 But for the most part, it's not really a feature that I recommend you use.
• 04:05 So i'll put this back to auto scheduling, and you can
• 04:09 see Microsoft Project is now calculating the critical path for me again.

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