Solutions Reality

In some places, TA needs to work a little differently from the EA ‘norm’. One of these areas is that often in TA you want to work with multiple elements at the same time such as allocating the same resource to a number of tasks or creating links between elements. When writing TA we added some features to allow this to happen - which in turn can have beneficial effects on normal EA modelling too…

In this article I’ll show you a couple of ways that you can use TA to create links between a new element and existing elements and also how to connect an existing element to multiple elements. This can be done no matter where the element is in the EA project browser.

This article arose because I was asked “how can I create multiple links to a milestone?”

You could add the links to/from the milestone one at a time by double clicking on the child element and then double clicking on the parent element (if you are in Gantt Chart mode) or by right clicking on the element in Grid mode. However, if you need to add a lot of links this could take a while…

If we have the following Gantt Chart:

(click to see larger). We can see that ‘milestone’ is currently set to occur after ‘Task E’. If we want ‘milestone’ to also follow Task Y, Task Z and Task2 then please follow the following steps:

• Switch to Grid mode.
• Highlight Task Y, Task Z and Task2 (press CTRL key to allow multiple row selection)
• Press the ‘add link’ button:
• (click to see larger)
• TA will now show the Add link dialog:
• (click to see larger). The specified link type will be created to connect all selected elements and the specified element. This means you could link hundreds of elements to a single element if so required…
• Click OK and TA will create the link…

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS ONE OF THE FEW ACTIONS IN TA THAT HAPPENS IMMEDIATELY. THESE LINKS WILL BE CREATED IN YOUR MODEL AS SOON AS YOU CLICK OK!

The model will be updated accordingly and the Gantt Chart will show the effect of these links:

Filed under: Time Architect by Matt
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