Hi,

Today I am going to show you how to change Duration or Start/Finish date on Summary Task using MS PROJECT 2019.

I am going to create simple Project with tow Tasks under one Summary Task, and I’m going to assign two different Resources to those Tasks:

In summary Task I can change Duration, Start Date, finish date, but I can not change Work. So I will change Duration to 6 days, and I will get:

Notice that when Duration (or Start or Finish Date) is changed the Summary Task is switched to manually Scheduled mode. If I change Start date, or finish date that will be no constraint set like in “regular” task (like: Start no earlier then, Start no later then etc.)

Now the right question is: Why should we change those values? One reason is that you want to compare what you have plan, and what is really happening. I will now put 7 days in Duration for Task 1, and I will get:

You can see that now the Summary Task (e.g. phase) will be later that planned, and this is why this bar is red. If I “right” click on finish date:

I can see in Task inspector where exact is the problem:

Here I have two possibilities. I can move the finish date according to subtask calculation, or I can switch Summary Task back to Auto scheduled Task.

I never change any field in summary Task, but also, I want to set a deadline for it. Instead of changing duration or Start/Finish Date I put Deadline like:

and I get:

Now if I change Duration to 7 days for Task 1, I will get:

So, I have the same effect, but also I left to MS PROJECT to make all calculations with Auto scheduled Summary Task.

Regards.