Schedule errors that go unnoticed in Microsoft Project
A schedule can look right on screen and contain errors that distort every date. The most frequent ones are easy to spot, as long as you know where to look.
- ✓Start and finish dates filled incompliant
- ✓Links between taskscompliant
- ✓Imposed date constraintscompliant
- ✓Resources on summary taskscompliant
- !Tasks with no resource assigned2 to fix
Microsoft Project calculates everything from what it is given. If information is missing or contradictory, it still calculates, and the result looks right. That is what makes some errors so hard to see.
Tasks without links
A task with no predecessor or successor does not move when the rest slips. The schedule shows a reassuring finish date, while part of the work no longer depends on anything. It is the most common error, and the most costly.
Imposed dates
Typing a start date by hand often creates a constraint. The task then stays frozen, even if the tasks before it fall behind. The schedule does not show the conflict: it hides it.
Tasks without a resource
A task with no one assigned appears in no workload view. The work exists, but nobody carries it. In our example, the testing and industrialization of a product launch had no resource: the team's workload looked reasonable, and it was not.
Other traps
- resources assigned to summary tasks, which count the work twice;
- milestones that have a duration;
- durations in weeks that hide the detail of the work.
Have the schedule checked
Reviewing a two-hundred-line schedule by hand takes time, and you end up no longer seeing the errors. That is why More With Project includes a virtual coach: it analyzes more than twenty parameters, flags anomalies and suggests fixes, directly in Microsoft Project.