More likely than not, you have tasks with different scheduling requirements or that need differing levels of control or flexibility. To accommodate this in Project 2010, you can easily mix manually scheduled tasks and automatically scheduled tasks in the same project plan.

For example, suppose you’re starting a new project. The five tasks in the first phase of the project are well defined and standard to many of your projects. From experience, you know how long each of the tasks should take. You also know that the first phase starts with the project start date and how the tasks are interrelated. You can enter the first phase tasks as automatically scheduled tasks.

On the other hand, six out of the eight tasks in the second phase of the project have few details or are too far in the future to be able to firm up those details. You want to update them yourself as information becomes available, without any repercussions from automatic calculation. You have durations for some and target finish dates for others. You’d rather not link any of the tasks or set date constraints on them. You retain the default for the six tasks as manually scheduled tasks, and you switch the other two to automatically scheduled tasks. (See Figure 5-5.)

Figure 5-5. Set your tasks to be manually or automatically scheduled as suits your purpose.

You might make such decisions throughout your project, allowing automatic scheduling for certain tasks and retaining manual scheduling for other tasks. Your criteria for choosing the task mode might have to do with how closely you want to control a task, how solid the task scheduling information is, or whether a task is still in the planning stages or has moved into the execution stage. Whatever criteria you choose, you have full flexibility over how you allow your tasks to be scheduled.