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
OK on the project above we will say framing has been going on for 5 days, then they hit a 10 day working delay. What I want to show is that framing, since they have started their task, is now 10 days past they're original duration after they had started. So instead of finishing on 6-28-22 they will now be finishing on 7-12-22(12 days+10 days). This in turn will bump back all successors back 10 days as well. However, since "Doors and Windows" haven't started yet this task technically doesn't have any weather and/or material delays so they should still be able to complete their task in 2 days still (+ 10 day adjustment to start date due to framing delay.)
So my ultimate goal is to only track individual task items that are going to be affected by delays, as they happen, not track the overall project delays like the Duration Variance does.
Pardon me for bumping into this post. Why don't you create a custom task Duration column named Total Delays and then enter this information for individual tasks that have experienced delays? You can add one or more notes to tasks that are delayed and explain the causes for the delays. Just a thought. Hope this helps.
- I am here for any and all advice/solutions so I appreciate your comment. And that is actually mostly what I am trying to do with a small caveat. If I add that "Total Delays" column and then put a number in it doesn't change my "Planned Finish" column. This means I would still have to go back to the "Duration" column and add the delays to that column as well. What I am trying to do is get the "Duration" column and "Total Delays" column to interact with each other and add up those days to get a new Planned Finish date. Then I would go into the notes column and say 2 days for weather, 3 days for material, etc.