Best way to show duration for this independent task.

[barrymoss]

I have a task that starts on the project start date and has no predecessors;
it is a truly independent task. The duration of the task is nine days and we
want to keep the nine days as the duration, but the task is pushing out to
the right for 6 weeks. It's not that the actual task is going to take any
longer to complete, but because of resource constraints it is only getting
pieces done at odd times. Basically, I want to show that it takes nine days
to do this task, as we want to keep this for historical data, but it needs to
show six weeks in the start/finish. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks in advance,
Barry

 

[Dave]

I have a task that starts on the project start date and has no predecessors;
it is a truly independent task. The duration of the task is nine days and we
want to keep the nine days as the duration, but the task is pushing out to
the right for 6 weeks. It's not that the actual task is going to take any
longer to complete, but because of resource constraints it is only getting
pieces done at odd times. Basically, I want to show that it takes nine days
to do this task, as we want to keep this for historical data, but it needs to
show six weeks in the start/finish. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks in advance,
Barry

You can save a baseline to illustrate your original 9 day objective.
Then your actual running plan can show that it has extended to 6 weeks.

You can see the difference between reality and the original plan by
using the tracking gantt.

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

If it takes nine weeks of work, simply display the work field.

If you are wanting to keep a history, then I suggest saving a project
baseline.
Go to tools menu, tracking, save baseline and save a baseline to one of the
baseline fields

Baselining takes a snapshot that you can refer back to or compare against.

-Jack Dahlgren

 

[Steve House]

I suspect you are making the classic mixup of work and duration. The
duration number is the total amount of (working-time calendar) time during
which work COULD have taken place (whether it did or not) between when it
starts and when it finishes - in your case, that's 6 weeks. Work is the
amount of time it would take if one resource worked continuously at capacity
with no distractions - again, in your case, this is 9 man-days (or more
accurately, 72 man-hours, assuming the default calendars). Your resource is
doing 9 days worth of full-time equivalent work, spread out over a duration
of 30 working days which means he's working at approximately a 30% level.