From Hadrian's Wall to the Millennium Dome every new building, ship, car or tacky novelty ashtray has undergone some form of project management in order to calculate such factors as cost and timescale. What Hadrian would have given to have the assistance of Office Project, we don't know, but it would certainly have made life a lot easier. So, by way of demonstration let us picture the great emperor having access to a laptop that had Office Project installed to help him manage the building of the wall.

The first thing he would have to do to get his ambitious plan off the ground is check the project information. (select Project/Project Information to open a dialogue box) and decide if he wanted to schedule the project from its start date or finish date. With the uncertainty of the weather in the north of England, and possible interruptions from marauding Picts, Hadrian would probably have opted to schedule his project from the start date. It is rare to see projects scheduled from the finish date, but such situations as a project needing to be completed by a certain date, or uncertainty as to the start date of a project may mean that the finish date is the better option.

So opting to schedule from the start date, Hadrian would select Project Start Date from the Schedule From list, then enter the date that the first task of the project would begin, in this case some time in 122 AD, and Office Project would calculate the finish of the project, by processing information contained in the task details (take note that you can only schedule a project from either the start or finish date; you can not schedule from both on the same project).

Scheduling from the start date, Office Project would automatically assign the default As Soon As Possible (ASAP) constraint for Hadrian (a constraint is simply a restriction placed on the start or finish date of a task). This is Office Project's default project scheduling setting, and it will choose today's date as the start date automatically. If there are any changes to your project caused by delays or suchlike (those darn Picts) then if you are scheduling from the start date, the project finish date would be automatically calculated again.

If Hadrian had chosen to schedule from the finish date, then the process would have been pretty much the same, but with some important changes. This time Office Project would assign the default constraint to start tasks As Late As Possible (ALAP) and, in a reverse to the above procedure, the start date would be automatically calculated.

It is worth noting, however, that, even if Hadrian had opted to schedule from the finish date, it would have been worth his while to switch to scheduling from the start date again when building of the wall got under way. This would make it far easier to follow the progress of the project, and to monitor any unforeseen situations that may move the finish date.

And with that Hadrian got his project off to a flying start. The Picts were thwarted and now, almost two thousand years later, there are still long sections of the wall remaining. Hadrian's Wall was the middle of three such fortifications, and is certainly the best preserved. Perhaps the reason for this is that the building of the other two didn't run as smoothly because, after Hadrian had completed his wall, they had nowhere to plug the laptop in to recharge the battery.