[ WAA Home | ProjeX Home | Download ProjeX | Help using ProjeX | ProjeX FAQ | About WAA]

Now that we have our tasks and dependencies defined we can to define the range of durations to expect for each of the tasks.

This can be done in two ways within ProjeX; the first is to select each task individually using the right mouse button and then select 'Task definition' and under the Dependencies' tab set the three durations and the type of skew required; the other approach is to start generating the PERT plot and ProjeX will prompt the user for any information that has not previously been entered.

The PERT calculations are started from the Excel menubar

The user is then asked about the way the critical path will be displayed (this is the same as the CPA option) and then the name for the PERT worksheet ProjeX will create.

ProjeX generates a new worksheet if the current ProjeX sheet is not a PERT sheet - why? There are two reasons, the first is that ProjeX tasks can be defined in a number of ways (eg start and end) but PERT requires duration. The PERT sheet that is created has all tasks defined as start and duration. The second reason is that PERT is used to calculate the duration of each task so this duration is changed whenever we change the PERT parameters.

A complete copy of the ProjeX sheet is made prior to starting the PERT process. This is important to note because any PERT parameters entered will only be set for the new PERT sheet (not the original ProjeX sheet which is left unchanged).

If any of the tasks do not have the durations or skew type set the following dialog appears to prompt the user:

After entering all the durations as per the table on the previous page the following bar chart is generated, critical tasks are colored blue and the durations are those calculated using PERT and the skews we selected.

This PERT sheet can be treated as a normal ProjeX sheet or the PERT parameters changed and the bar chart regenerated.