Sometimes you will want to constrain a specific meeting to a given day of the week. At one client, there was an “Infrastructure change control” meeting that was always held on Thursdays, and any change needed to be presented. If you missed this Thursday, your change had to wait until next Thursday to be approved.
It was essential to code this into Plans to see the amplified impact of only 1 day of slippage.
To do this, you have to set up a new calendar that only has Thursday as a working day:
- Project / Properties / change working time
- Click on “create new calendar.”
- Give it a name (for instance, ICC) and base it on the standard calendar.
- Click on the “Work Weeks” tab at the bottom and then the “details” button
- Set Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday to nonworking time.
- Click on OK and then OK again to close the dialogue boxes.
You now have a specific Calendar called ICC which can be applied to either a resource or individual tasks. Note that this method does not work for milestones as milestones don’t have any work and so can ignore calendars.
If you have a resource called “ICC”, then you cal apply this to the task using the standard resource methods, and the meeting will jump out to the following Thursday:
- Apply the ICC resource to the task
- Change working time for the ICC resource and make its base calendar the ICC Calendar
This method is simple, quick and easily understood. The only issue is that if other resources are applied to the meeting, for instance, if you need to show who’s attending the session, the task can become smeared over many days:
This happens because MS Project believes that the other resource (CIO) can be working on the task on Monday, and then the ICC resource can finish off on their day in the office. This doesn’t seem right, but it is a standing issue in MSP.
To avoid this, you can apply the calendar to the task instead.
- Double click on the task to bring up the Task Information dialogue
- Display the Advanced tab and select ICC from the Calendar drop-down
- OK to close the dialogue.
Notice that you don’t need the ICC resource to be applied to the task.
