ALAP constraint behavior question

[ThinAirDesigns]

Hi there. Moderate Projects user over the years with a scheduling need I've never encountered and I'm hoping I'm just ignorant of an easy solution. I'm currently using a very old 2002 version.



Attached is an image with three figures (all different screen shots from a simple 'project' created just to illustrate my issue). This sample project has 3 floating activities and a 'project completion' milestone which has an artificial hard completion date. The behavior of Activity #2 is what I'm attempting to control (I want the float gone).

All relationships are simple 'FS' with zero lag. Activities 1 and 3 are constrained 'ASAP' in all three figures.

In figure 1, Activity 2 is constrained 'ASAP' with the expected float reflecting the difference in duration between activities 1 and 2.

In figure 2, Activity 2 is constrained 'ALAP' which has taken the float out of Activity 2, but pushed Activity 3 down to the project end and the float is now reflected in the start of Activity 3.

Figure 3 is what I'm trying to achieve (without a hard constraint). I want the float gone between activities 2 and 3, but I can't have 3 pushed down to the end of the project. In other words, I want Activity 2 to be ALAP while Activity 3 is ASAP. This may sound like a directly conflicting requirement (and it may be as related to Projects' capabilities), but it's not conflicting if one thinks of activity 2 being ALAP relative to Activity 3 while Activity 3 is ASAP relative to the project as a whole.

Can this be done in Projects 2002? Any version of Projects? Any version of a CPM software?

Remember, it's the described principle I'm interested in -- it would be easy in this little snippet to just 'hard constrain' and get away with it, but I'm involved in a relatively large scheduling project and in such any hard constraints will really create issues as things are updated.

Thanks.
JB