Chapter 8: Scheduling and Linking Project Tasks

Overview

If you use Project only to enter tasks and task durations, as described in Chapter 7, you could just as easily use Word or Excel to create these tasks lists. After all, both Word and Excel provide tools for creating such lists and make it easy to resequence and sort the lists.

Microsoft Project, however, is more than just a list creator.

The real power of Project lies in its capability to calculate schedules based on task relationships and resource assignments. In Chapters 9 and 10, you’ll learn about allocating resources and costs. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use scheduling to show relationships between tasks, to identify which task must come before another, and to investigate how the completion or start of one task affects the others. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Creating a project schedule using predecessor and successor tasks

• Assigning different types of task relationships

• Linking tasks

• Modifying linked tasks

• Entering task delays

• Applying constraints