Allocating work hours to resources

[Howard]

Hi,

I'm trying to assign available work hours to resources within a project's
task in MS Project 2000. I'm only tracking tasks and time, not $$ costs.
For example, task 1, I've assigned Jane to it, and she's been given 12 hours
per year (long range project lasting over 2 1/2 years). How can I assign
Jane just the 12 hrs.? Do I need to figure out manually what the % is?

Thanks, Howard

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

12 hours per YEAR ?????? Are you talking about 1 task that is running
several years yet only requires a total of about 30 hours of work on it
spread out over its total duration? No offense intended but why are you
even bothering scheduling something so trivial?

A "task" is usually considered a single discrete block of work within the
project that is performed by a single resource and produces a single output
deliverable. The duration is how long it will take from when actual work
commences on it until the time when the deliverable will is completed and
handed off to the next task in the chain of events.

If your project runs 2 1/2 years I would be very surprised if it didn't
involve dozens of different discrete identifiable activites. Before you
even start to think about assigning resources and their hours you need to
list all of those different discrete activities in detail. If you don't, you
don't have anything to assign the resources to. If we have 8 hours of work
that can be done at any time within a 2 year time frame but whenever we do
it the resource will devote their full attention to it and perform the work
in a continuous block, that's not a 2 year task, that's a 1 day task with a
deadline 2 years after the project starts. The rule of thumb is a task
should run between 8 and 80 hours - over 80 hours and you're not detailing
the work sufficiently to manage it while under 8 hours and you're
micromanaging to excess. A single task with 12 hours of work per year
running for 2 1/2 years sure doesn't seem to fit into those guidelines.

For most normal activities one should try to assign resources 100% to each
task they're on. The case you described with it as a single task would be
30 hours of work spread over about 5000 hours of duration, 30/5000, or a
0.6% assignment level, hardly worth bothering with. She'll spend more total
time than that visiting the washroom or making the occasional personal phone
call on company time.

 

[John]

Hi,

I'm trying to assign available work hours to resources within a project's
task in MS Project 2000. I'm only tracking tasks and time, not $$ costs.
For example, task 1, I've assigned Jane to it, and she's been given 12 hours
per year (long range project lasting over 2 1/2 years). How can I assign
Jane just the 12 hrs.? Do I need to figure out manually what the % is?

Thanks, Howard

Howard,
One way to do it simply is to first enter the Task Duration, but be
careful, entering it as "years" may not give the end date you want
because "work years" is not readily defined. It is probably better to
enter the Duration as hours. Then enter the Work hours (12). Finally,
assign Jane as the resource. Project will automatically calculate the
assignment allocation although it will show up as "0" units or "0%"
because it is such a small number over the duration.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[Howard]

I had a feeling this was going to be the reaction. I need to account for her
time (albeit small) for a newsletter subject that only needs her quick
review. I'm in the planning part of this, and am trying to estimate time.
This task will be recurring monthly, and won't take more than 1 hr per month.

H

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

In that case EACH monthly instance of her review should be a separate, 1
hour duration task to which she is assigned 100%. You can easliy enter all
30 of them in one swell foop by entering it as a monthly recurring task from
the Insert menu. Remember that the 100% means that out each hour of
duration she works on the task she accomplishes 1 man-hour of work. In this
case that makes perfect sense because even though its only a small fraction
of her total working time, for the time she's actively doing the review she
can't be also doing other things as well. Her attention is focussed 100% on
the task at hand. The result of entering a recurring task is a collapsed
Summary task showing the full 2 12 year's duration, 30 hours of total work.
When you expand the summary, you'll see each individual 1-hour task detailed
out, once a month on the day of the month you specified.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[Howard]

Thanks John

Howard,
One way to do it simply is to first enter the Task Duration, but be
careful, entering it as "years" may not give the end date you want
because "work years" is not readily defined. It is probably better to
enter the Duration as hours. Then enter the Work hours (12). Finally,
assign Jane as the resource. Project will automatically calculate the
assignment allocation although it will show up as "0" units or "0%"
because it is such a small number over the duration.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[Howard]

Thanks Steve. Is there a better way to input a total amt of hrs, since this
project is more of a effort driven process than an exact science 8h/day,, 40
hr/week work schedule?

Thanks, H

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Do you mean hours for the specific task or hours for the project as a whole?
If you're talking about her hours for the review task, I think the best way
is to do it is as I suggested <humble bow>. Keep in mind that work hours
and duration hours are quite different critters. She'll need to have 1 hour
a month set aside to do the reviews. So I'd just say she needs to have 1
hour set aside on each, say, last Friday in the month for the length of the
project. Assume that for that hour she can give full attention to the
review process, and assign her 100% to it. Project will calculate the total
man-hours she's putting in for you and for a 2 1/2 years (ie, 30 month)
project it will total out she'll do 12 hours per year or 30 hours total. No
calculating at all required on your part. I also feel strongly that it's
not the job of the PM to structure the resource's workday - they're usually
perfectly capable of doing that on their own. So if she finds on some of
those Fridays she's got other stuff on her plate and postpones the review
until Monday or juggles a couple of fires at once and so works on the review
from 9am to 3pm while fielding other demands on her time instead of 9am to
10am as the project schedule might call for, well why worry about it. It
all evens out in the end. You've estimated it will take her 1 man-hour per
month to do the reviews and you've scheduled her to do reviews for one hour
per month on dates that seem reasonable and that's really all that's needed.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[Howard]

Steve,

Thanks for all your help today! I appreciate it.

Howard