Can I do MS Project task durations in seconds or even tenths?

[Bob S.]

If I could get smaller task time durations, I could use this for industrial
time study work particularly for cost estimating a project by assigning
resources to each subtask. Unless there is a better product out for this
type of work, I have not found it. Thanks - new to this forum.
Am using Project Professional 2002 SP-1

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Bob S --

The minimum Duration for any task is one minute in any version of Microsoft
Project. Sorry.

 

[Bob S.]

Thanks for responding. I would think this would be a fairly easy adaptation
that would open a new market for Microsoft and Project. Maybe not so easy?
Don't see the value?

 

[Jim Aksel]

Although the smallest unit of measure understood by Project is one minute,
you can still scale the values to meet your needs. For example, change the
time scales and units of measure to be in minutes (tools/options...). Next,
right click on the horizontal time scale and change that to be in minutes as
well, but have the display be 1,2,3,4.... (from start).

Now you have a scale the is (really) units of minutes from when the starter
fires his pistol. However, if you want, just pretend that value represents
seconds. When you enter your durations a 10 second task is entered as 10.
Project understands this as minutes, but you know it means seconds. It will
still stretch from 1-10 on the time scale.

There are some other considerations. For example, I would probably use a 24
hour calendar to assume the tasks can happen at any time. Also, you want to
make sure every task has appropriate predecessors and successors and never
key a date value in start or finish.

Also, it may be worthwhile to display the start and end times of the tasks
in these "duration units" as well (rather than calendar days). I have a
white paper on my blog that gives you the basics of how to get it started--
the paper's focus is on "Project Days" but with a little thought I think you
can revise the formula for it to be any unit of measure you desire.

So, in the worst case, your values are off by a multiple of 60. If you
think about it, you could also pretend that the unit of measure is the
nano-second (0.000000001) Now your multiplier is a huge number. We're
shifting decimal points and have to account for the fact that time is base 60
not base 10.

I hope this makes any type of sense

--
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Jim Aksel, MVP

Check out my blog for more information:
http://www.msprojectblog.com