PM 3000 Unit 2 DQ2 MS Project schedule guide

Most of this brief is countable, which is unusual and useful. A project spanning three months, a minimum of twenty tasks, a start and an end date on each, resources attached to each, and at least five dependencies. Those are the numbers the marker will check first, before reading a word of your description, so satisfy them literally and visibly. What makes the assignment harder than the list looks is that two of those instructions fight each other inside Microsoft Project. Typing a start and an end date on every task and then adding dependencies produces a schedule where the dependencies are drawn but drive nothing, and the giveaway is that nothing downstream moves when you change an upstream duration. Understanding why is most of the learning here. Build the schedule once, break it deliberately, and you will have the reflection written for free.

Project has two task modes and they behave completely differently. A manually scheduled task keeps whatever dates you type and Project will never move it — that is the entire point of the mode, and it is the default in recent versions. An automatically scheduled task is computed from duration, links, calendars and constraints, but the moment you type a start date into one, Project quietly adds a Start No Earlier Than constraint using that date. So both routes end at the same place: dates you typed win, and the five dependencies you were asked to demonstrate become decoration. If your schedule does not ripple when you lengthen an early task, this is why, and it is the single most common thing that goes wrong on this assignment. Check it in thirty seconds: add two days to your first task and watch whether anything after it moves.

So build it in the order Project expects. Enter the twenty tasks with durations rather than dates, set them to automatic scheduling, give the project a start date once, then link the tasks and let the finish dates fall out of the network. The brief asks for start and end dates on every task and you will have them — computed rather than typed, which is the correct reading of the requirement and the one that survives a marker dragging a task bar. Assign resources after the links are in, because resource levelling can shift dates again and you want to see that happen. If you must pin a real-world date — a launch, a trade show — pin exactly that one task and say in your description that you did, and why. A single justified pin reads as judgement; twenty of them read as a spreadsheet.

The twenty tasks need to read as a marketing campaign for a chat app, not as filler. A defensible breakdown moves through positioning and audience research, messaging and creative development, asset production across the channels you have chosen, channel and tracking setup, a launch window, and post-launch measurement. That structure also generates your dependencies naturally: creative cannot start before messaging is signed off, paid channels cannot go live before tracking is in place, measurement cannot start before launch. Dependencies invented to reach five look arbitrary; dependencies that fall out of a sensible breakdown do not, and the description you write afterwards has something real to talk about. Aim for four or five phases with four or five tasks each, which reaches twenty naturally and gives the Gantt chart a shape a reader can follow. Name each task with a verb and an object, so the resource assignment obviously belongs to somebody.

Two parts of the submission are easy to lose. The first is the written half — the issues you encountered, the solutions you found, and which Microsoft Project features helped most. That is a reflection with three named components, and the scheduling problem above is exactly the kind of issue it wants. The second is that the Additional Requirements block on this unit asks for a five to seven slide PowerPoint with detailed notes and the submission of a video presentation, while the discussion task itself asks you to attach a schedule to your post. Those are different deliverables. It reads as course-level boilerplate rather than as this week's instruction, but confirm which applies before you build slides you do not need. Ask in the discussion thread rather than by email, since your classmates are reading the same contradiction.