In an effort to reduce the amount of manual manipulation of program schedules for my team, I am looking for recommendations on how to manage past due remaining work hours in resource loaded MSP schedules (which are baselined and using fixed work, not tracking actuals in the schedule), Is there a way to respread planned work hours across the existing tasks while maintaining the durations/dates?
The current approach is to use "update project" to replan hours after the status date. But this creates a lot of extra manual manipulation to correct the start/ finish dates for every task in the waterfall logic which are affected by the "update project" process. In a majority of cases the start/finish dates do NOT need to change, the hours just need to be respread across the remaining time-phased tasks (which is very common in many types of engineering projects where 80% of the work gets done in the last 20% of the discreet task).
If 'Update Project' is used on fixed duration tasks the dates/durations don't change, BUT the remaining work hours do and this is also a problem. IME, P6, & OpenPlan both allow respread of remaining hours across existing time-phased tasks without changing dates. Is there a way to do this in MSP?