Re: Change Work field default to change hours, not duration?
- From: "Steve House" <sjhouse at hotmail dot com>
- Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 11:25:08 -0400
Jan and salgud gave you the answer how but I'd like to add a note of caution about using Fixed Duration in general. Work is the amount of effort the task requires, expressed as man-hours. Duration is the time that will elapse between the moment when work on the task begins and when it ends. Allocation is the rate at which the resource accomplishes work over time. With fixed duration tasks and manually adjusting hours it's all too easy to end up with resource allocations >100%, which are a physical impossibility, at least for a single individual. There is simply no way that one person can do 12 man-hours of work over the course of an 8 hour workday, for example, which showing an allocation percentage of 150% would promise. As you juggle your hours, keep an eye on the allocations to make sure the resources don't get overallocated, thus promising senior management progress that you can't deliver.
Another caution with your approcah ... tasks require a discrete deliverable, no more and no less. Your task is to install upgrades to 100 workstations. It takes 1 hour for 1 tech to upgrade 1 workstation and that is engraved in granite by the physical nature of the process. The required work for that task is 100 man-hours and it simply can't be anything else - it's not a number you get to arbitrarily choose. You cannot schedule less because you won't get all workstations upgraded. You shouldn't schedule more because why waste a tech sitting in front of a workstation doing nothing. So what are the variables? The rate at which the resource can work and the time it will take to do all the upgrades. He can do 1 per day, allocation 12%, and it will take 100 days or he can do 8 per day, work on it 100%, and it will take 12 days. But if you want it in 8 days it can't be done without finding another tech somewhere. You can choose allocation and duration it will take will follow or you can choose duration and the allocation you must use will follow, but you have no flexibility when it comes to work, you MUST schedule no less than 100 man-hours or you don't get the project done, and you SHOULD schedule no more than 100 hours or you go over budget. That's why most tasks are Fixed Work and generally should be left that way.
Just something to keep in mind as you decide how to proceed.
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs
"kmbrly" <kmbrly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:751DFFD8-5FCD-4C15-B4F5-A737766BA829@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
When you change the Work field, a drop-down list will appear with the option
to Decrease/Increase the number of work hours but keeps the task duration the
same. I'm in IT so very few resources have a 100% allocation to one project.
An 8 hour activity may take 2 peopel 4 days.
I'm not about to try to calculate resource % allocations per every task to
eventually come up with the duration AND work hours I need. My scheduling
effort would increase 3 fold.
I've been told that there is a way to change to default so that, when you
update the Work field, it will not recaluculate the Duration field. We can't
figure out how to get that done. Does anyone else know?
.
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