Forum Discussion
Combining 2 duration columns to get one Finish date
Well, it will report that plumbing was starting 10 days later but that's Start Variance, not Duration Variance.
Sorry but you can't add something to the finish date without increasing the Duration field, unless you also change the Start field. Duration is the difference in working days between the start of a task and the finish of a task, unless there is a split, then task duration only tracks the scheduled working days where the span of the split is excluded. For example, in the screen shot below, framing for building one was going along swimmingly for the first three days, then over the weekend a storm blew in and delayed further framing for 3 days. That 3 days is entered into a custom Duration field (Duration1 renamed as "Delays") and a split is applied to the framing task. Note the task Duration field still shows the original 20 days but the split delay shifted the schedule to the right by those 3 long rainy wet days (yuck). If other delays occur, additional splits can be applied. The advantage here is the the delay is graphically very apparent but you could, as Dale suggested, make an entry in the Task Notes field why the split occurred.
So how do you do a split? It can be done manually via Task > Schedule group > Split task icon and then hovering your mouse over the start of the split and pulling it over the 3 days. Or, it could be done programmatically with VBA, enter the delay, run the macro and boom! there it is.
Is you head spinning yet?
John
Lets say roofing started and we are 2 days in out of 4 days total and it happens to rain for 2 days. Instead of changing my overall duration from 4 to 6, thereby "deleting" my contractual date from the schedule, I would like to add a "Delays" column and add 2 days to that. Then I would like to make it where the finish date is able to add those 2 columns together ( 4 Day contractual and 2 day weather delay) to come up with my start and finish dates.
Thanks
Please explain more about this "contractual duration". I've never heard of such a thing, contract requirements for critical dates or finish date but never duration. Are you telling us each and every task has a contractual time span requirement?
If you saved a baseline you will not be "deleting" anything from the schedule. As I explained before, the whole point of a baseline is to provide a comparison of the original (contract?) schedule with the current schedule. So your "delays" column is the Duration Variance field.
Even if I wrote a VBA macro to do the manipulation you want the end result would be no different than simply updating the current schedule by increasing the schedule duration.
What am I missing?
John
Sorry if my explanations aren't clear.
So as you can see in the picture below roofing is set to be 3 days. If it rains for 2 days, while they are in the middle of roofing, instead of increasing it from 3 to 5 days duration, I want to add the weather delays into "Duration1". When I do this I am looking at some way to add both of those Duration columns together so that it will automatically change my Planned Finish from 12/17/21 to 12/21/21(2 days later).
So basically add "Duration" (Contractual Duration) and "Duration1" (Delays Duration) to get my planned finish.
I want to easily be able to see the amount of time they should have taken and the amount of days delays has added. However with Duration Variance I can only see the baseline difference and not adjust Duration Variance.
Does that clear it up at all?
Thanks,
.
- MSprojecthelpme,
No, not really, but let's play along. After reading your explanation a few times it seems you want to have a separate custom field where you can manually enter delays and then have that delay modify the plan, a kind of "after the fact" scheduling approach. Okay, let's try it.
In your roofing example it rained for 2 days so you enter that value in Duration1 and that ups the task duration to 5 days. What happens if on day 4 you discover the supplier is short 10 bundles of shingles and it will take a day to get them shipped in from another warehouse. Will you then enter that delay into another Duration field or will you change the entered value in the Duration1 field so it now shows 3 days (original 2 for rain delay and new 1 day delay for shingles)?
You say you want to easily see the amount of delay and that's exactly what the Duration Variance field supplies. But for some reason you want to take the extra step to separately enter the delay into a custom field which is then used to update the task Duration when you could just as easily enter a new task duration directly into the task Duration field, saving the extra field and step. The delay visibility is still available via Duration Variance.
For reference, VBA stands for Visual Basic for Applications and it is an integral part of most Microsoft applications. It allows a user the ability to create application functionality that is not available "out of the box"
John- John, I think we are on the same page now. And my Duration1 column would just be all delays for that specific task in general, whether it is weather or material, and I guess another way to put it is this:
I more or less want to track the delay for each individual task item. Say I have a project that is 11 different buildings. Over the span of a year the framing delays could be say 60 working days by the time we get to building 11. The framers have 20 days to frame a building. The duration variance will show they are 60 days behind according to the original baseline. However, they may get the building done in 18 days which puts them ahead of schedule on that specific task item.
So I guess I'm saying all that to say that yes I would like to do an after the fact adjustment so I can track delays on every specific task that is delayed. To put it in excel terms I want to be able to add Column A(Duration) and Column B(Duration1) to equal my finish date. I am not very well versed in MS Project but is there not a custom fields formula that would allow me to do this?
Thanks