Constraints 1. Start / Finish On or After2.

Start / Finish On or Before

Start / Finish On or After:

Applying this constraint fixes the Early Dates of the activity. Hence during Forward Pass the Early Date (Start or Finish) of the
activity is fixed and the Early Date ≥ Constraint Date. An activity’s late dates are not affected by this constraint. This constraint is
particularly useful when an activity cannot happen before a particular date. For example – Delivery dates or certain release
milestones

In the above example, we apply constraint “Start on or after = 6″. During forward pass the ES= 6 instead of 3, and the Early Dates of
the subsequent activities are calculated according to this date. Hence, the floats of the activities change after applying this particular
constraint.

Start / Finish On or Before:

Applying this constraint fixes the Late Dates of the activity. Hence during Backward Pass the Late Date (Start or Finish) of the
activity is fixed and the Late Date ≤ Constraint Date. An activity’s Early dates are not affected by this constraint. This constraint is
particularly useful when an activity cannot happen after a particular date. Example – Completion milestones etc.. It can be used to
highlight delays in completion activities as when an activity gets delayed, it starts getting a negative float equal to amount of days
delay from the constraint date. Hence, it helps us in judging the impact of delay on activity.

In the above example, we apply constraint “Finish on or After = 3″. During Backward Pass the LF= 3 instead of 4, and the Late
Dates of the subsequent activities are calculated according to this date. Hence, the floats of the activities change after applying this
particular constraint.

Constraints – Part 1

Lets look at 2 similar types of constraints, but when I say similar, I mean similar in the way that it affects the activities and floats,

1. Project Must Finish By

2. Mandatory Start / Mandatory Finish

1. Project Must Finish By:

This constraint is applied at project level in the project details tab. When we apply this constraint it fixes the Late Date of the last
activity of the project and hence it affects the calculations during the backward pass. Let’s take a look at the following example;
In the above scenario the project finishes on 6th day, but we would want the project to finish on the 5th day. Hence we apply Project
Must Finish By = 5 and schedule it. During backward pass the constraint kicks in and forces the last activity C to finish it on 5th day
and calculates from there on. Hence we get a total float of -1 on the activities.

Now what do we do with a Total Float = -1?

While monitoring projects with fixed Finish Deadline, it helps us to understand that all the activities with a Total Float of -1 will need
to finish 1 day before the Early Finish (EF) date and hence our resources need to be planned accordingly. It also helps us in similar
way if we are creating ‘What-if’ scenarios, cause we would know what activities do we need to expedite and whether we would be
able to achieve the productivity required to match the reduced durations.

2. Mandatory Start / Mandatory Finish

This constraint can be used in situations where one particular activity in a project has a fixed Start/Finish date. Once we impose this
constraint on the activity it affects both Early as well as Late dates. Let’s take a look at the example below:

In this example Activity B has a Mandatory Start Constraint on day 2. What this does is that the LS & ES dates of activity B get fixed
at day 2. Hence during Forward Pass the Early Start of Activity B gets fixed at 2 and due to this the activities which are dependent
on B get affected. During backward pass the same process is followed and the activities preceding B are also affected where Total
Float of Activity A becomes -1 even though the constraint is on Activity B. While it is okay to use Mandatory Start/Finish constraint,
we need to understand its effects on Preceding and Succeeding activities before using it.

Constraints – An Introduction

Work has been keeping me quite busy these days so i have decided to blog short but frequent posts from here on. Today we will
talk on using Constraints in Primavera.

All of us at sometime or the other have used constraints in Primavera but have usually restricted ourselves to using  “Mandatory
Constraints”  only as we don’t know how other constraints would behave.

We have the following options in Primavera if we want to use constraints :

1) Project Must Finish by

2) Mandatory Start / Mandatory Finish

3) Start / Finish On or After

4) Start / Finish On or Before

5) Start / Finish On

6) Expected Finish

Each of these constraints when used would affect the floats in our activities in a certain way. Our requirement depends on what
dates(Early/Late) do we want to see get affected by these constraints. For ex. ‘Project Must Finish by’ constraint works on the whole
project itself and affects the Late dates of the activities. The constraint date becomes a start off point for the backward pass
calculations.Same way ‘Start/Finish On or After’ affects how our Early Dates are calculated and it comes into play during Forward
Pass Calculations.

Each of these constraints can be used to our advantage if we know how to use them correctly, especially when we want to monitor
activities that are related to deadlines, permits, clearances etc. . We will go into details of each constraint one by one from my next
post.