Re: Duration 1 month = 1 calendar month

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The reason is that duration only includes working time, not elapsed time. The same thing happens with a "day." A duration day is not 24 hours, the time between one sunrise and another. It is a working day, typically 8 hours, the time that passes between when an individual resource comes in to work and when he goes home for the day. The elapsed hours when that resource is not there during a day or a week or a month simply don't count for duration. For planning purposes they might as well not exist at all. A basic question Project seeks to answer is "If task X requires this many man-hours of effort to achieve its results and we can start on Monday, when will we finish it?" Only times when people are physically present working will count to burning up required effort hours. Nothing happens during non-working time and so no progress is made during those hours. As a result, saying "I expect this task to take 3 calendar months" doesn't really convey any information about the task since it fails to take into account how much of that 3 months is productive time and how much is non-productive time. Remember Project tracks everything down to the minute and the ability even to use months as a unit in the first place is structly there as a convenience for planning to a very rough crude approximation. When you get to planning the real schedule you need to be thinking in smaller units than that. - I like to remember the 8/80 rule, which says tasks should be longer than 8 hours but less than 80 - over 80 you're not planning in enough detail to effectively manage the work and under 8 you're meddling excessively in the resource's workday. There are exceptions to that, of course, but it's still a pretty good guideline.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs



"Matt Schiemer" <MattSchiemer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:E48F9018-1A7B-480B-8C04-A081AFA9B235@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks, John. I'm very surprised that Project can't deal with lunar (normal)
calendar months. I've noticed several other comments/questions regarding
this issue -- hopefully it's something that Microsoft can build into future
versions...

Thanks again.

"John" wrote:

In article <0833DFFD-DCD0-4715-90D4-2CCE3697BE8B@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Matt Schiemer" <MattSchiemer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I need help with getting the "duration" of 1month to equal one calendar > month
> in terms of start and finish times. When I set the calendar to a 7 day > work
> week it seems to work for a duration set in days (i.e., 365 day > duration with
> 1/1/06 start date will show end date of 12/31/06), but if I input a > duration
> of 12 months for that same 1/1/06 start date, it goes from 1/1/06 to > 1/7/07.
> Why won't 12 months also finish on 12/31/06?? How can I get one month > to
> equal one month??
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.

Matt,
Because Project does not use a lunar calendar. That is, some months have
30 days and most others have 31. However the real answer to your
question is a settings found under Tools/Options/Calendar tab. The
setting for "Days per month" is based on a default 20 working days per
month and that's what Project uses when it calculates duration in
months. You could reset it to be 30 days per month but then it wouldn't
track with Feb, Mar, May, etc.

Not the answer you were looking for but if you want more-or-less exact
durations, use "days". You can set the duration to be elapsed days if
you want. To do that add "ed" to the Duration value.

John
Project MVP


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Duration 1 month = 1 calendar month
    ... Try to reverse the process - instead of thinking in terms of broad spans of time, start at the lowest level and plan from the ground up. ... You've said you don't know the duration of any of sub-project to better than a month or even a quarter year yet you're worried that MSP shows the start date of the next one in line as Sept 3 instead of Sept 1!! ... Setup your subprojects initially as tasks with the appropriate links, detailing subtasks if known, and use the best/likely/worst duration estimate to give you several alternative schedules for high level planning purposes. ... in calendar months as my smallest unit of time. ...
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  • Re: Actual Work moving to future
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  • Re: Problem with dates/durations on a plan containing imported dat
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  • Re: Duration 1 month = 1 calendar month
    ... know the duration of any of the projects is no better than ... in calendar months as my smallest unit of time. ... For planning purposes they might as well not exist at all. ... Steve House [MVP] ...
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