I've never really enjoyed project management all that much, but I'm starting to have to be more active about it to make things work well in my current job. As a result, I actually (gasp) created a project plan from scratch today.
In the process, I learned something kind of cool about Microsoft Project. We do our production deployments for one customer on Tuesdays, so when I put in tasks for deploying to production, I want them always to show up on the next available Tuesday, but I don't want to have to adjust it any time I change other things in the sequence.
I happened across a page somewhere that talked about 'task calendars', so I started monkeying around with them. Ultimately, I created a calendar called 'Production Runs' that has working hours only from 5pm to 11:59 pm on Tuesdays and assigned the production deployment tasks to that calendar.
Project complains when I do that the first time for a task that there aren't enough working hours, and I haven't figured out why, but it does what it should - as I change other things about the sequence of tasks, the production deployment tasks automatically shift to the proper Tuesday.
Now I just need to go back in and change the weeks when we'll be deploying late because of Monday holidays.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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