Changing Project Scope

In the course of checking and adjusting your project plan, you might need to cut scope. For example, to meet the finish date, you might need to cut tasks you perceive as optional. To bring project costs in line with your allotted budget, you might cut tasks associated with increased quality or quantity that you think you can live without. Or maybe you need to cut an entire phase or deliverable to alleviate resource overallocation.

Note

Your task list is likely based on the scope statement that all the stakeholders, including customers, originally approved. If you need to cut scope, you might have to go back and obtain stakeholder approval for these changes.

There are two ways to remove tasks from your project. One way is to completely remove the task. In a task sheet, click the task’s row heading and then press the Delete key.

The other way is to inactivate the task. In a task sheet, select the task. On the Task tab, in the Schedule group, click Inactivate. All information in the task row is dimmed and shown in a strikethrough font, as shown in Figure 10-40.

Changing Project Scope
Changing Project Scope

Inactivate

Inactivated tasks and their associated Gantt bars still show as “ghost” images in your project plan, and you can reactivate them later if needed.

Figure 10-40. Inactivated tasks and their associated Gantt bars still show as “ghost” images in your project plan, and you can reactivate them later if needed.

With inactivated tasks, you can still show tasks in the project plan, even though they’re deleted. This is a great way to show managing stakeholders which tasks or deliverables they might or will lose as a result of cutting scope to meet a date or budget. In this way, you can use inactivated tasks to show and schedule what-if scenarios. When you decide on the course you prefer to take, you can reactivate tasks by clicking the Inactivate button again.

Inactivated tasks and their associated Gantt bars still show as “ghost” images in your project plan, and you can reactivate them later if needed.

Inactivating tasks is also good historical data. If you later create a new project based on this plan, you’ll have the inactivated tasks in place, and you can decide whether to include them in the new project based on your experiences with this project.

An inactivated task behaves exactly like a deleted task. The only difference is that its information, including its Gantt bar, still shows.

Caution

If you delete or inactivate an automatically scheduled task that includes links to predecessors or successors, be sure that the scheduling for the tasks still in place is not adversely affected. If you delete or inactivate a predecessor, for example, the successor could end up being scheduled back at the project start date unless you link it to a different predecessor.

However, this is not true for manually scheduled tasks. If you delete or inactivate a manually scheduled task that’s linked to others, the tasks that were previously predecessors or successors tend to remain scheduled where they were.

You can also delete a summary task that represents an entire phase or group of related tasks. To delete a summary task, click its row heading and press the Delete key. A message appears and warns you that deleting the summary task will delete all of its subtasks as well. Click OK to confirm that you want to do this.

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