Can Resources Work More Than 24 hours Per Day?

[Dan Hutchinson]

Is there a way I can set a resource to work 90hours/day? We are combining a
few different resources and need it to show that when we put 100% of a
resource to something it is putting 90 hours a day toward it. Now we are
setting it at 22.5 hours/day, and putting 400% towards the tasks to give us
90 hours per day, but it shows up as being 300% overallocated in the Resource
Graphs and reports. Thank you.

 

[JackD]

You are doing it right. The only thing you missed is to go to the resource
sheet and set max units to 400% for that resource and your overallocation
indicator will disappear.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

100% means the resource is working full speed and every minute of time
worked is being converted to 1 minute's worth of work output. So in a 24
hour day it is physically impossible for a resource working 100% to do more
than 24 man-hours of work. On the other hand, a resource that is a
collective group of workers - say a custodial staff that has 5 people whom
you have chosen not to differentiate by name in your resource list - CAN
generate more than 1 hour of work output for every hour of work time put in.
In this instance you would show "custodians" as your resource and with 5 of
them on staff your Maximum Allocation entry would be 500%. A resource is
overallocated when they go over the designated maximum. So if you assigned
3 custodians to the task and it had an 8 hours duration, you would assign
them at 300% and the result would be their performing 24 man-hours of work
over the course of an 8 hour task duration. You won't get red flagged until
you go over the 500% defined maximum - that marks the overallocation
becausethat assignment says that every available person is fully comitted to
this task and you have no more resources who could be assigned. OTOH, if
you assigned at 300% while leaving the maximum allocation in the resource
definitions at 100%, you'd get red flagged as overallocated because what
you're telling Project is that you have only have one warm body available
and yet you're going to put them on a task and expect them to do the work of
3 people. Hardly a reasonable expectation.

I have a problem with setting the calendar to reflect a 22.5 hour workday.
To do so means that a single individual resource, Joe Worker, once he starts
on a task will work on it continuously, day and night, only taking a total
of an hour and a half out of every 24 for sleep and meals and time with his
family, potentially for weeks at a time, until that task is done. Again,
that is hardly a reasonable thing to expect out of your workers. People
simply aren't capable of that grueling a work schedule. I'm going to assume
that your real situdation is something more reasonable - a group of workers
who cover different shifts and collectively they cover the 24 hours of the
day. Assume for discussion a shift is 8 hours plus an hour for lunch. You
would create not one but 3 calendars - Days (8am-5pm), Swing (3pm-12m),
Grave (11pm-8am). If you had 15 custodians equally divided around the
clock, create 3 resource groups, Day Custodians 500%, Swing Custodians 500%,
and Grave Custodians and assign each collective resource the appropriate
calendar that describes their shift. You have a task that is going to run
around the clock for 2 24 days and requires 3 custodians per shift. Assign
Day Cust @ 300%, 48 hours work, Swing Cust 300% 48 hours work, Grave Cust
300% 48 hours work. Task duration will be 48 hours and if it starts Monday
at 8am it will end Wed at 8am. That will result in a total 9 different
custodians, 3 per shift, working a total of 2 days, all of them doing 2 8
hour shifts each, a much more humane schedule with a total of 144 man-hours
of work being generated and probably closer to what your resources really
are doing.

 

[John Sitka]

If I have one request of the Project world it is that there is eventually a clear universally
accepted notion that Resources can be people, teams, robots, machines, bacteria etc.
The fact that the ones that can't report for themselves must have agents to do it for them, does
not mean they can't stand alone or in groups; that they do not have profound effects on Project
outcomes and in know way should they have to suffer levels of abstraction as to their productivity.
(100% is absolute.). I would never schedule or plan anything in other than a 24 hour project calendar.
It makes no sense and only works if you are willing to accept a large amount of variation
in you resource availability or restriction to the application of them.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

The problem with using a 24 hour calendar is that it defines the hours
during which work *will* take place. If I say a task begins Monday and ends
Friday and my calendar is MS Project's 24 hour calendar, that means that
once work starts on that task on Moday morning, it is not interrupted until
the task is complete. Work will take place continuously, without any break,
for that entire time period. If I now assign Fred to do that task, it means
he will not eat or sleep or see his family for that entire period of time.
That's simply not a realistic expectation. Even we're thinking about a
machine as the resource, most machines only function when their human
operators are there to control them, so the same logic applies - the 24 hour
calendar implies that the machine's operator will be expected to be on duty
24/7 for the entire duration. Of course in many Projects the work does run
around the clock, in the aggregate. But for the most part, tasks are broken
down to the level of either an individual worker or a group that makes up a
collective skill-set, like a painter and his assistant or an operating room
surgical team, that must work together as a single unit. And those people
need time off from time to time. Since their tasks will only take place
when they are physically present to do the work, the task timings in the WBS
even before resources are assigned should reflect the fact that the work on
that specific task will proceed on only part of each workday. If Joe is
polishing the fids, work will only take place on the polishing task for the
portion of the day that is Joe's work shift - the fact that there are 16
more hours in the calendar day when someone else could be polishing fids is
irrelevant. Only Joe is going to be doing it because we took our task
breakdown to that 1 resource=1 task level of detail and so in terms of the
schedule for the work of polishing fids, only Joe's 8 or so work hours exist
each day.

For the tasks where it will be assigned to multiple workers who work shifts
that collectively span the 24 hours, my suggested mothod works like a champ.
Use the standard calendar for the project calendar. Create three resources
and edit their resource calendars so one is working 8-5, another 3-12,
another 11pm -8am. Start the project Monday at 8am. Enter a 40 hour
duration task. It will start Monday 8am and end Friday 5pm. Assign Joe
Dayshift to it. Work will be 40 man-hours. It starts Mon 8am and ends Fri
5pm, just what you'd expect with one guy working on it. Add Bill
Swingshift. It will now show ending Wed at 7pm. Remove Bill and this time,
together in one operation, add both Bill Swingshift and Fred Graveyard. The
task will show ending Wed about 5:30am and the usage views will show it
proceeding 24 hours a day until 40 man-hours of total work, split evenly
between the three workers, has been accomplished. What's wrong with that
approach? In my opinion, that's a very accurate model of the way real world
work and real world resources would behave.

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

 

[John Sitka]

The problem with using a 24 hour calendar is that it defines the hours during which work *will* take place.

But the task will only be worked on when the resource is available. I don't have an opinion on your approach because it simply
dosen't make sense to me. In your multi resource assignment in what way has the Standard Project Calendar influenced anything at
all, once resource calendars are defined; This is a good example of putting the constraint on getting work done where it belongs,
with the availability of the resource. If one Resource is "rouge" why would you want them to have to follow the herd in order to be
accurate about their contribution. Simply set their resource calendar to reflect their availabilty. Everybody has one (people,
teams, robots, machines, bacteria etc.) hardly a burdensome configuration when it provides universality. Maybe it's not an issue.
For modelling apply task calendars, across a 24 hr Project Calendar. Upon assignment let the plan be responsive to the resource
calendars. Maybe my outsource is showing, or the three shift nature of Motown.

 

[JackD]

John,

Perhaps Steve is missing the key point of your approach which is that EVERY
resource has a calendar and EVERY task has a resource assigned. Given that
both of those conditions are satisfied then you are absolutely correct, the
standard calendar just gets in the way. Still, many people do not have
resource calendars for every resource and many others do not have resources
assigned to every task (this is especially true early in the planning
stages)
--
-Jack ... For Microsoft Project information and macro examples visit
http://masamiki.com/project
or http://zo-d.com/blog/index.html


..
during which work *will* take place.

But the task will only be worked on when the resource is available. I

don't have an opinion on your approach because it simply

dosen't make sense to me. In your multi resource assignment in what way

has the Standard Project Calendar influenced anything at

all, once resource calendars are defined; This is a good example of

putting the constraint on getting work done where it belongs,

with the availability of the resource. If one Resource is "rouge" why

would you want them to have to follow the herd in order to be

accurate about their contribution. Simply set their resource calendar to

reflect their availabilty. Everybody has one (people,

teams, robots, machines, bacteria etc.) hardly a burdensome configuration

when it provides universality. Maybe it's not an issue.

For modelling apply task calendars, across a 24 hr Project Calendar. Upon

assignment let the plan be responsive to the resource

calendars. Maybe my outsource is showing, or the three shift nature of Motown.

"Steve House [Project MVP]" <[email protected]>

wrote in message news:[email protected]...

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

Well said.
Let me put it a bit more abstractly:

Project Calendar ONLY influences scheduling of tasks that have NEITHER a
resopurce assigned to it NOR a task calendar. It is a simpel default and
putting it to the 24 hrs calendar may well not change the schedule at all -
providing all tasks have (a) resoruce(s) assigned and/or a task calendar.

Of course, when the base calendar upon which you base teh resource calendars
IS teh project calendar, that is different.
HTH

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/
+32-495-300 620
during which work *will* take place.

But the task will only be worked on when the resource is available. I

don't have an opinion on your approach because it simply

dosen't make sense to me. In your multi resource assignment in what way

has the Standard Project Calendar influenced anything at

all, once resource calendars are defined; This is a good example of

putting the constraint on getting work done where it belongs,

with the availability of the resource. If one Resource is "rouge" why

would you want them to have to follow the herd in order to be

accurate about their contribution. Simply set their resource calendar to

reflect their availabilty. Everybody has one (people,

teams, robots, machines, bacteria etc.) hardly a burdensome configuration

when it provides universality. Maybe it's not an issue.

For modelling apply task calendars, across a 24 hr Project Calendar. Upon

assignment let the plan be responsive to the resource

calendars. Maybe my outsource is showing, or the three shift nature of Motown.

"Steve House [Project MVP]" <[email protected]>

wrote in message news:[email protected]...

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

I like to see the plan approximate what it will be after the resources are
assigned even before they are actually added to the tasks. If you use the
24 hour calendar as the Project calendar and enter a 40 hour duration task
that begins Mon at 8am, it will show proceeding 24/7 and ending Wed at 4am.
9 times out of 10, though, when we assign a resource to actually do the work
we will be assigning either 1 warm body or a small group who work as a team,
all with the same hours. So I assign Joe Resource who works day shift 9am -
6pm and the finish time of that task zooms out to Friday at 6pm. IMHO,
that's a huge jump in elapsed time. What I would prefer to see is a task
that does not have a resources yet assigned, or one that for some reason we
choose not to assign a resource to, enter the schedule showing an overall
elpased time that is reasonably close to what it really will be when it's
worked. If my Project Calendar is the default standard 8-hour calendar,
that same task will enter the schedule as Mon 8am to Fri 5pm. Now when I
assign the same Joe Resource, the finish time jumps only 1 hour, to Fri at
6pm, NOT almost 3 whole days as it did before. A 1-hour difference (or even
a 1 day difference) between pre-assignment and post-assignment finish time
is acceptable, a 3-day difference between them is not. I want the plan to
be showing a 1st order approximation of the actual timings we'll obtain even
before we put in the resources. Hence I suggest that the project calendar
be specified as the work hours of a generic "average" resource who is
involved in the project, not the general business hours of the firm. After
all, if all the resources involved in the project happen to be from the day
shift, that fact that we operate 24 hours a day becomes irrelevant. If
everyone involved works days, work will never be taking place at 3am and so
at no time do I want to see tasks in schedule, whether they be with or
without resources, showing that it will. With the 24 calendar they will show
continuing 24/7 until we assign the resources to limit the hours. With my
suggested approach, they won't.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

The problem with using a 24 hour calendar is that it defines the hours
during which work *will* take place.

But the task will only be worked on when the resource is available. I
don't have an opinion on your approach because it simply dosen't make
sense to me. In your multi resource assignment in what way has the
Standard Project Calendar influenced anything at all, once resource
calendars are defined; This is a good example of putting the constraint on
getting work done where it belongs, with the availability of the resource.
If one Resource is "rouge" why would you want them to have to follow the
herd in order to be accurate about their contribution. Simply set their
resource calendar to reflect their availabilty. Everybody has one (people,
teams, robots, machines, bacteria etc.) hardly a burdensome configuration
when it provides universality. Maybe it's not an issue. For modelling
apply task calendars, across a 24 hr Project Calendar. Upon assignment let
the plan be responsive to the resource calendars. Maybe my outsource is
showing, or the three shift nature of Motown.

The problem with using a 24 hour calendar is that it defines the hours
during which work *will* take place. If I say a task begins Monday and
ends Friday and my calendar is MS Project's 24 hour calendar, that means
that once work starts on that task on Moday morning, it is not
interrupted until the task is complete. Work will take place
continuously, without any break, for that entire time period. If I now
assign Fred to do that task, it means he will not eat or sleep or see his
family for that entire period of time. That's simply not a realistic
expectation. Even we're thinking about a machine as the resource, most
machines only function when their human operators are there to control
them, so the same logic applies - the 24 hour calendar implies that the
machine's operator will be expected to be on duty 24/7 for the entire
duration. Of course in many Projects the work does run around the clock,
in the aggregate. But for the most part, tasks are broken down to the
level of either an individual worker or a group that makes up a
collective skill-set, like a painter and his assistant or an operating
room surgical team, that must work together as a single unit. And those
people need time off from time to time. Since their tasks will only take
place when they are physically present to do the work, the task timings
in the WBS even before resources are assigned should reflect the fact
that the work on that specific task will proceed on only part of each
workday. If Joe is polishing the fids, work will only take place on the
polishing task for the portion of the day that is Joe's work shift - the
fact that there are 16 more hours in the calendar day when someone else
could be polishing fids is irrelevant. Only Joe is going to be doing it
because we took our task breakdown to that 1 resource=1 task level of
detail and so in terms of the schedule for the work of polishing fids,
only Joe's 8 or so work hours exist each day.

For the tasks where it will be assigned to multiple workers who work
shifts that collectively span the 24 hours, my suggested mothod works
like a champ. Use the standard calendar for the project calendar. Create
three resources and edit their resource calendars so one is working 8-5,
another 3-12, another 11pm -8am. Start the project Monday at 8am. Enter
a 40 hour duration task. It will start Monday 8am and end Friday 5pm.
Assign Joe Dayshift to it. Work will be 40 man-hours. It starts Mon 8am
and ends Fri 5pm, just what you'd expect with one guy working on it. Add
Bill Swingshift. It will now show ending Wed at 7pm. Remove Bill and
this time, together in one operation, add both Bill Swingshift and Fred
Graveyard. The task will show ending Wed about 5:30am and the usage
views will show it proceeding 24 hours a day until 40 man-hours of total
work, split evenly between the three workers, has been accomplished.
What's wrong with that approach? In my opinion, that's a very accurate
model of the way real world work and real world resources would behave.

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

If I have one request of the Project world it is that there is
eventually a clear universally
accepted notion that Resources can be people, teams, robots, machines,
bacteria etc.
The fact that the ones that can't report for themselves must have agents
to do it for them, does
not mean they can't stand alone or in groups; that they do not have
profound effects on Project
outcomes and in know way should they have to suffer levels of
abstraction as to their productivity.
(100% is absolute.). I would never schedule or plan anything in other
than a 24 hour project calendar.
It makes no sense and only works if you are willing to accept a large
amount of variation
in you resource availability or restriction to the application of them.





"Steve House [Project MVP]" <[email protected]>
wrote in message 100% means the resource is working full speed and every minute of time
worked is being converted to 1 minute's worth of work output. So in a
24 hour day it is physically impossible for a resource working 100% to
do more than 24 man-hours of work. On the other hand, a resource that
is a collective group of workers - say a custodial staff that has 5
people whom you have chosen not to differentiate by name in your
resource list - CAN generate more than 1 hour of work output for every
hour of work time put in. In this instance you would show "custodians"
as your resource and with 5 of them on staff your Maximum Allocation
entry would be 500%. A resource is overallocated when they go over the
designated maximum. So if you assigned 3 custodians to the task and it
had an 8 hours duration, you would assign them at 300% and the result
would be their performing 24 man-hours of work over the course of an 8
hour task duration. You won't get red flagged until you go over the
500% defined maximum - that marks the overallocation becausethat
assignment says that every available person is fully comitted to this
task and you have no more resources who could be assigned. OTOH, if
you assigned at 300% while leaving the maximum allocation in the
resource definitions at 100%, you'd get red flagged as overallocated
because what you're telling Project is that you have only have one warm
body available and yet you're going to put them on a task and expect
them to do the work of 3 people. Hardly a reasonable expectation.

I have a problem with setting the calendar to reflect a 22.5 hour
workday. To do so means that a single individual resource, Joe Worker,
once he starts on a task will work on it continuously, day and night,
only taking a total of an hour and a half out of every 24 for sleep and
meals and time with his family, potentially for weeks at a time, until
that task is done. Again, that is hardly a reasonable thing to expect
out of your workers. People simply aren't capable of that grueling a
work schedule. I'm going to assume that your real situdation is
something more reasonable - a group of workers who cover different
shifts and collectively they cover the 24 hours of the day. Assume for
discussion a shift is 8 hours plus an hour for lunch. You would create
not one but 3 calendars - Days (8am-5pm), Swing (3pm-12m), Grave
(11pm-8am). If you had 15 custodians equally divided around the clock,
create 3 resource groups, Day Custodians 500%, Swing Custodians 500%,
and Grave Custodians and assign each collective resource the
appropriate calendar that describes their shift. You have a task that
is going to run around the clock for 2 24 days and requires 3
custodians per shift. Assign Day Cust @ 300%, 48 hours work, Swing Cust
300% 48 hours work, Grave Cust 300% 48 hours work. Task duration will
be 48 hours and if it starts Monday at 8am it will end Wed at 8am. That
will result in a total 9 different custodians, 3 per shift, working a
total of 2 days, all of them doing 2 8 hour shifts each, a much more
humane schedule with a total of 144 man-hours of work being generated
and probably closer to what your resources really are doing.

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



message Is there a way I can set a resource to work 90hours/day? We are
combining a
few different resources and need it to show that when we put 100% of a
resource to something it is putting 90 hours a day toward it. Now we
are
setting it at 22.5 hours/day, and putting 400% towards the tasks to
give us
90 hours per day, but it shows up as being 300% overallocated in the
Resource
Graphs and reports. Thank you.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

I didn't miss it so much as am looking at a general situation where not all
tasks may have resources assigned and in the inital stages of developing the
plan it's likely that none of them will. Even in the earliest rough-draft
stages, well before resources are assigned, I want to see the elapsed times
and dates in the plan while it is without resources showing a reasonable
approximation of what the timings will be once the resources are assigned.

If some of my tasks are being done by contractors I may not enter a resource
assignment for them at all so their scheduling will be governed by the
Project Calendar even in the final plan. Making the 24 hour calendar as the
project calendar means those tasks will be scheduled 24/7 but in reality
they too will probably only proceed about 8 hours a day, a typical
individual worker's day in most Western societies. Since I don't control
the contractor's work schedule I may not know WHICH 8 hours out of each day
will have work in them but in my schedule the elapsed time between when that
task begins and when it ends still should reflect that we'll probably get 8
and we're unlikely to get 16 and very unlikely to get 24 hours worth of
progress out of each 24-hour elapsed calendar day.

In short, using the 24-hour calendar as the Project Calendar assumes work on
a task will proceed around the clock until it is done unless the hours per
day are restricted to less than that by the resource assignment. Using a
variation of the Standard calendar, conforming to your basic day-shift
office hours, as the Project Calendar assumes work will proceed at the rate
of about 8 hours per day unless the hours are expanded by multiple resource
assignment(s) of workers extending over several shifts. I suggest the
former is a relatively rare situation and the latter describes the vast
majority of real world working conditions even for firms that do business 24
hours a day.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

John,

Perhaps Steve is missing the key point of your approach which is that
EVERY
resource has a calendar and EVERY task has a resource assigned. Given that
both of those conditions are satisfied then you are absolutely correct,
the
standard calendar just gets in the way. Still, many people do not have
resource calendars for every resource and many others do not have
resources
assigned to every task (this is especially true early in the planning
stages)
--
-Jack ... For Microsoft Project information and macro examples visit
http://masamiki.com/project
or http://zo-d.com/blog/index.html


.
during which work *will* take place.

But the task will only be worked on when the resource is available. I

don't have an opinion on your approach because it simply

dosen't make sense to me. In your multi resource assignment in what way

has the Standard Project Calendar influenced anything at

all, once resource calendars are defined; This is a good example of

putting the constraint on getting work done where it belongs,

with the availability of the resource. If one Resource is "rouge" why

would you want them to have to follow the herd in order to be

accurate about their contribution. Simply set their resource calendar to

reflect their availabilty. Everybody has one (people,

teams, robots, machines, bacteria etc.) hardly a burdensome configuration

when it provides universality. Maybe it's not an issue.

For modelling apply task calendars, across a 24 hr Project Calendar. Upon

assignment let the plan be responsive to the resource

calendars. Maybe my outsource is showing, or the three shift nature of Motown.

"Steve House [Project MVP]" <[email protected]>

wrote in message news:[email protected]...

 

[John Sitka]

I see your point now, still not a fan. I guess because 9 to 5 is not generally
average enough to be of any use. But that's just an environmet thing central to my condition.
Machines do run unattended and on some projects just as much work gets done outside
of the 9 to 5 window as does inside of it.

I want the plan to be showing a 1st order approximation of the actual timings we'll
obtain even before we put in the resources.

I don't even consider the 1st as a draft. Since resource availability has far more impact than
the logical sequence or work estimates of a plan. If something takes 3 days it's only meaningful
if there is a chance the resource will be available within a window set by practicality. Much like you did here.
(3-day difference between them is not). Some landscapes are such that 3 day windows only happen
about every 3 weeks. That is the difference between finite planning and infinite planning.
The 1st draft if developed without resource considerations is of little value.
With a humanistic approach very few people are fortunate enough to only ever have to
dedicate their efforts to a single project. We are all in a mutiproject environment, forever.
That's why they call it work.