Project Randomly Adds Duration, Which Delays Finish Date

[glubad55]

I frequently have issues with MS Project 2010 adding phantom time into my tasks, as shown in my attached photo.
My task calendar is 24 hours (no holidays or time off), task type is Fixed Work, task constraint is As Soon As Possible, and the affected tasks match up nicely on the calendar with the other tasks.

See the line in italics. It starts on Wednesday at 2 pm with a 2-hr duration. Given that I have specified (read: "made sure that it has") 2 hours of work, it should calculate easily. Instead, it adds something like 2.5 days to the project.

Note: I can drag the task "bar" located the right sidei n the Gantt Chart to the left and that generally fixes it, but without scouring the entire project for this, I might be unnecessarily adding precious hours to a project, and in a very large project where this random addition occurs, this could become an engineer's nightmare.

 

[IRstuff]

While pictures are allegedly worth a thousand words, the actual file is priceless.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[glubad55]

Here you go.

 

[IRstuff]

Oops, I'm running 2003; any chance you can convert the version down?

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[glubad55]

I hope not much has changed between versions, relating to this problem.
Scheduling is always automatic in 2003; manual scheduling is available in my version.

 

[IRstuff]

I can only suggest that it's a consequence of whatever you did to that specific task previously. MSP has what I think is a serious issue with "stickiness," i.e., it "remembers" things you did earlier to a specific task, and changing an input may or may not result in the desired outcome. For example, if you change Task3's Duration from 2 hr to 1 hr and then back to 2 hr, the end date/time changes to the correct value.

TTFN
faq731-376