Substation extension - a sample MS Project plan
Fifty tasks extending a 132 kV substation, read from an .mpx - the plain-text format Microsoft dropped a quarter of a century ago and half the industry still exchanges.
- 50 tasks
- 6 summaries
- 10 milestones
- 23 on the critical path
- 2 levels of nesting
- 51 dependencies
- 10 resources over 44 assignments
- 6 calendar exceptions
Six phases - design and approvals, long-lead procurement, civil works, plant installation, testing and commissioning, outage and energisation. Ten milestones, twice as many as the other samples here, because a connection job is a sequence of gates: connection agreement signed, design approved, outage window confirmed, plant delivered to site, civils complete, outage starts, circuit energised, handover to operations.
The critical path runs through procurement, not through site work. Long-lead procurement is a hundred and ten days and it is critical - the longest bar in the plan is a factory lead time, and nothing on site can pull the job forward while it runs. That is usually the answer people are after when they ask why a job cannot be accelerated.
The outline is two levels deep rather than three, and the six calendar exceptions carry no names at all. An .mpx keeps less than a Project .xml does, and the reader shows what is in the file rather than filling the gaps. Structure and dependencies are real; the content is invented.
This one was read from an .mpx export. There are more sample plans, or you can open a file of your own - nothing is stored either way.