I work in the mining field, and have recently been given the responsibility of scheduling my piece of equipment within the overall project. Normally this is all done by the Planning Engineer, but this has been assigned to me. While comfortable being a team member working within and contributing input data for a scheduled plan, I am not familiar with scheduling, & tools such as Project. My turn to step up to the plate – I now have Project 2019 installed. This is going to be challenging but I see it as a great learning opportunity, and great skill to have!
I have been provided an excel sheet with the overall project schedule. This has two of the 3 main tasks for all the work areas, I have to schedule my third main activity into this. My activity is a little more adhoc, being required every 4th or fifth cycle.
The data table is structured so that we have 3 main tasks, a few main project areas (text abbreviation), many individual work areas (numeric id), start dates, finish dates, & duration’s for each of the individual work areas. I will have planned durations for individual work areas for my task – with the aim of determining the required start date for my task (& two sub tasks) as a predecessor to the following (already scheduled) task. In summary, I am task A (duration, but with no dates), that goes ahead of tasks B & C (which have existing scheduled durations and dates).
My issues are that I am unsure how best to have my data structured for import? I currently have it by task, with three rows for each individual work area. In addition, when I import the worksheet, Project is populating the blank date fields for my task with those of the following task, and overwriting the durations to suit. I need the durations for my task to calculate the planned start date for my activity as per the description above. There has to be a better way than to manually go back and correct the durations for my task.
