Steve
Sun May 11 10:25:08 CDT 2008
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@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:751DFFD8-5FCD-4C15-B4F5-A737766BA829@microsoft.com...
> 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?