Working Time changes cause unexpected results

[mmfranke]

I was given a project in which the calendar is set to use 6.4 hours per day, 32 hours per week and 16 days per month. I believe these settings were used in an attempt to account for overhead -- time that the resources don't get to spend on the actual project.

First, if I create a task of 5 days' duration, it only seems to make it 4 calendar days long. I think I understand this, though it's not quite intuitive (6.4 hours times 5 equals 32 hours, or four 8-hour days).

Now, if I change the 6.4 hours per day in the calendar to the standard 8, I see the overall duration of my project decrease, as expected. However, I don't understand why I also see the overall Work number decrease. Why would the work change at all? Nor do I understand why the actual start and finish dates of my project don't change.

Please explain.

I've duplicated this situation in a simple test project, which I've attached.

Thanks, in advance.

Mike

 

[MSPtrainer]

Your situation stems from misunderstanding how the calendars work. In general when you create a task it will assign a "day" as what the project calendar says is a day and also the calendar options (tools, options, calendar). Then when a resource is assigned the assignment looks at the resource availability on the resource calendar and the schedule is controlled by the resource calendar after that. UNLESS - there is a task calendar with override of the resource calendar flagged.

So now you have a situation where the task was created at 6.4 hours = a day and the resource says something else and the calendar options could be saying something else and you have a mess on your hands. This is why the calendar and options should be set up before the first task is entered. If you had changed the calendar after the tasks (and the assignments) are in, you get things even more goofed up. The fact that the work number is changing at times leads me to believe you are also using fixed duration tasks. The amount of work would be tied to the amount of time a resource has available within a time period. You could also be using effort-driven when you shouldn't. You might also be plugging dates and creating contraints.

So what is your solution? Create a new project with the correct calendar settings and with the resources set up correctly and import in just the task names and the relationships. Set up your task types and effort-driven flags per task. Then start entering work and/or duration per task. And then start creating assignments. sorry, no easy fix for this one.