duration settings

[Silvia]

I want to set the duration of activities in a project of 4 years, entering
the actual duration in months. If I enter the duration in months and the
start date of the activity, the end does not match the actual length of
Calendar. Which option I must change in order fto obtain that the 6 months
scheduled are really 6 month and not working months (lasts 20 days?)


Ex.
Duration: 6months - start: 1 April 2008 - end: 15 September 2008 (what I get)

Duration: 6months- start: 1 April 2008 - end: 1 October 2008 (what I want: 6
months Real)

 

[JulieS]

Hello Silvia,

You could use 6 emons for 6 elapsed months. An elapsed month to Project
is 30 calendar days. However, be careful of using elapsed duration when
resources will be assigned to the tasks. Because elapsed duration tasks
count 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, you'll end up with wildly
improbable work scheduled for your resources.

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional information
about Microsoft Project

 

[Steve House]

Project doesn't do that. It always works in working time minutes to the
nearest 10th and the calendar units of days, weeks, months, etc are only
there as a matter of convenience for data entry. Since Project is
scheduling specific, exact, required amounts of work, using calendar units
quickly break down. If it used them, "1 month" of work in January would
have a different amount of work in it than "1 month" of work when the month
is February and would produce a different amount of deliverable, making
rational scheduling impossible.

If you find you are scheduling durations that are several months is length,
some warning bells ought to go off. There's a general rule of thumb called
"the 8/80 rule" that holds true in a great many real-world projects. It
says that if you are finding you have a signifigant number of tasks of less
than 8 hours work you're probably trying to micromanage to excess, but if
you have individual tasks with greater than about 80 hours duration you
aren't detailing the project work out into small enough units to be able to
effectively manage it.