Scheduling tasks to start today

Question

I have a plan that's broke up into a few stages. I want to schedule the first couple tasks in stage 2 to start as soon as possible, there are no predecessors for these tasks. My tasks in the middle of stage two are dependent upon the completion of tasks from stage 1 and the first tasks of stage 2, so those scheduled start dates are driven and being updated from the work in stage 1.

My plan was created months ago and my tasks at the start of stage 2 have still not been started for reasons outside the project. So now my scheduled start dates still have 2013 dates for those tasks and its now February.

Is there a way to have Microsoft Project 2010 adjust the scheduled start dates for tasks that have not started yet to be "today" for tasks that have no predecessors and can start as soon as possible. I'm trying to avoid updating the tasks to "start no earlier than" and manually updating those dates each time I update the plan.

Answer 1

You need to use the Update Project functionality. Use this to "Set Uncompleted Work to commence after" and select yesterday's date if you want it scheduled for today. Usually people just leave it at the default which is today's date, meaning all uncompleted work is commenced from tomorrow.

Note that when you have done that you may find it has scheduled work in parallel so that resources have too much to do in one day. Use Levelling to allow MS-P to resolve all the overallocations and reschedule all the tasks to resources so they can be achieved.

See also this answer which is a similar problem with the same solution: How can I update a MS Project plan to show schedule slippage?