 Hi, my name is Richard Walters. In this demonstration, we're gonna look at project automation and this covers areas like constraints, lag and lead, as well as setting the project start date. In this demonstration, we're gonna look at automation within Microsoft Project, looking at three automated features, namely the project start or finish date, lag and lead time, as well as constraints. We're gonna start off the project start, finish date. So here we've got a start date of the 6th of November, 2023, so the 6th of the 11th, 23. We're gonna update this to the 4th of the 12th, 23. So the news is that there's a news project start date. So project tab, this time project information and the start date we're gonna update to the 4th of the 12th. And then when we click okay, you'll see all the dates will now align with this new start date. Now this is only available in auto-scheduling, so manual-scheduling, this to start date change wouldn't affect any manual-scheduling tasks. And there we go. Next automation we're gonna look at is a constraint. So we're gonna say here that the engineer manager is unavailable for work due to long-term illness. So we're gonna put a constraint in to say we're gonna delay it by six weeks in this example. So we're now going to go to the task affected, which is ID one design job specification. I'm gonna double left click. Add the constraint using the advanced. Come down to constraint type. As soon as possible means no constraint and this is the method you also use if you wanna remove a constraint. In this example, ours is start now early then. Whenever I'm doing this kind of work, I always look at the start date of the task, which is the 4th of the 12th. And I'm gonna count forward six weeks. So one, two, three, four. It's the 15th of January. I'm gonna put a note in as well to say the engineer manager is on long-term illness. The minute we click okay now, we'll watch all the dates change in the task when we'll move out now to the new date I've selected and every other date will be delayed. And there we go. We've now gone out to the 15th of the first and we've now got the little indicators in the information column. And there's your constraint and there's your note. There's the reason for it. The final automation when you look at this example is the lag and lead. So lag means you're lagging behind schedule, lead means you're pulling ahead. So the task can either be in lag or in lead. So for this to be used, there's gotta be a link going on between two tasks. So here the first interview and the second interview are linked together. It's the second interview that's affected. So I'm gonna double left click the second interview. Gonna go to the predecessors section. And your lag and lead is in the far right column. Zero lag. They both get put in the same place. So a lag if you're lagging behind is a positive number and a lead if you're pulling ahead is a negative number. We'll try both with a two day lag firsts or two. And what will happen with this two day lag? It'll change the finished date. It'll change the duration of the project from 56 days to 58 days. It won't change the six days duration of the second interview, but it gives you another indicator to show you what's happened. I'll demonstrate this shortly. Okay, right. So there's the 58 days now. Didn't change the second interview, but what it does do in the predecessors column, it tells you plus two, because that is lagging behind. So that's where it does tell you against that one task. So it's a plus two, but it doesn't change the duration of the task. We'll apply the same method now for a lead pull ahead minus two this time. Okay, and there's gone to 54 days. It's taking two days off minus two this time. And sometimes when you do this kind of work, you might get a resource conflict, which we're seeing here, which I demonstrate in other videos. But this is now lag and lead and how this works, as well as the automation areas we also covered, which was project start date, constraints, and finally now lag and lead. This completes the demonstration on project automation. See you in the next video.