Change finish date with fixed start date

Question

I'm new to Ms Project and I have a bit of a problem. I've already made a schedule, the tasks of which already have proper dependencies. I have just been instructed to now use a deadline that if I were to move it, all of the tasks would also be affected in a way that the amount of resources will increase but the start date is fixed. Is it possible to do that?

As a bit of a background, I self taught myself Ms Project only a few days ago and my boss has already told me to do all these stuff despite nobody in the office understanding how the program works so it'd be very much appreciated if you could explain everything in layman terms because most of the time I'm completely lost.

Thank you very much in advance.

Answer 1

Assuming the answer to my question in the comment is yes, you would establish a proper constraint for your project start, you would establish "fixed duration" for all of your project tasks, and then you would reduce the duration of those project tasks, especially those on the critical path, and your finish date will come in. Each of those tasks will require additional resource utilization and the basic formula MS Project uses is Duration = (Work/Utilization). So if duration and work are fixed, then utilization will need to change to make it work.

However, the reality of that is questionable. That simple formula is not valid across all tasks. Tasks have different resource elasticity so in some cases, adding employee utilization could in fact cause the duration to stay the same or even increase, not decrease.