How to model extended period of 'searching for product' tasks in MS-Project?

Question

We run a sale of second hand goods from clients. We would set a target say 200 items this season and start contacting people we know who have items they want to sell. We would spend about 2 months doing this, then for each item we bring back to office, we need to check, research and photograph it. Then we would design and publish a sale catalogue.

How would you model this in MS-Project? Should I have a summary task that's 2 month long? But then there is no point creating 200 sub-tasks for each item. How could this be represented in MS-Project in a meaningful and useful way to track my team's progress?

Answer 1

Have a single task "Acquire 200 items" with a 2-month duration

You can have a single task named "Acquire 200 items" with a 2-month duration. If, for example, at the end of one month you have acquired only 80 items, you can show the task 40% complete.

However, if I were you. I will try to break-up that 2-month task into smaller ones. Let us say, that you estimate your team has to make about 1000 cold calls in the first 2-weeks in order to find people that have items to sell, I will track that as a separate task.