entering actual duration question

[Jack]

I have a Fixed Duration task of 12 hours - a meeting of three four sessions
to determine test cases - which has completed.
The timeframe for 12 hours to occur could be accomplished in 2 days but
because of other things on each person's schedule (i.e vacation, other
commitments, etc.) it took 2 weeks to perform the 12 hour task
Since all planned attendees attended, I enter 12 hours at the task level and
let Microsoft divide up the work hours.
I also physically entered both the start date (of our first meeting of
11/8/2004) and the end date (of our last meeting of 11/23/2004).
Once I entered the above start and finish dates of the meetings, MS Project
lengthened my actual duration to a much longer duration than 12 hours.
Why? I'm not sure what I need to do to get MS Project to reflect the
reality of 12 hours duration?

 

[JulieS]

Hi Jack,

I think you are confusing duration and work. The task may only have taken
12 hours of work but the duration of the task was the amount of working time
(as defined on the project calendar and in Tools ->Options) from the start of
the task to the finish of the task. Assuming Saturdays and Sundays are
nonworking days, the task duration from 8 Nov 2004 to 23 Nov 2004 is 12 days.

I also assume when you say you entered the start and end dates, I hope you
entered those dates in the Actual Start and Actual Finish fields (visible on
the tracking table), not the Start and Finish fields.

Hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie

 

[Jack]

I don't believe I'm confusing duration and work. The duration of the (Fixed
Duration) task was (48 hours of work/4 resources at 100% is) 12 hours (3
sessions of 4 hours each) and work was (12 hours with 4 resources is ) 48
hours. And I did enter Actual start and end dates.

 

[Sarah]

Yes, you are confusing them. As Julie stated, duration is the time from
the start to the finish of the task. If you tell Project that you
started Nov. 8 and finished Nov. 23, Project doesn't care how many
hours of WORK the resources spent, the DURATION of time (time span)
between when you told it the task started and when you told it the task
finished, is what Project displays in the Duration field.

Sarah

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

The duration is NOT 12 hours. The duration is the total number of possible
working minutes between when the work starts until the it ends. The fact
that work is not continuous is irrelevant. As Julie said, the duration of
your task is 12 days not 12 hours. While the work may actually be taking
place over 12 hours of time broken into 3 4-hour sessions, the duration is
the total time where work *could* have taken place according to your working
hour calendar between when the first session starts and the last session
ends. If I have a task that starts Mon 8am where I apply a coat of
slow-drying paint taking 1 hour to put on, then I let it dry waiting until
Friday at 4pm to apply the 2nd finish coat and I'm done, the work is 2 hours
but the duration is 40 hours. It's 40 hours and not 104 hours because the
calendar says working time is Mon-Fri 8am-5pm and so the hours during the
evening don't count for duration but the hours on Tue, Wed, Thu during the
workday DO count for duration even though work isn't actually happening
then.

 

[Jack]

Thank you all for your responses. I believe I misunderstood task duration in
this instance.

 

[Jack]

I'm not too familiar with splitting tasks. Is this a situation where if you
split the task three times MS Project would reflect the actual 12 hour
duration for that task?

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Be careful! You said "actual 12 hour duration" and that is incorrect. The
actual duration is 12 days, period, accept it. It is essential that you
internalize the concepts as MS Project defines them (and MSP follows the
ANSI standard PMBOK definitions and practices very closely), not as you
think they should be defined <grin>. That being said, yes, if you split the
task the gaps are treated as non-working time and the duration would then be
shown as 12 hours.

Actually, the way you described the task initially, I'd strongly suggest you
make it three separate 4-hour tasks altogether and schedule each session as
an entity totally independent of the other two - there's nothing that says
similar or even identical tasks cannot occur many times during a project.
To me that is a far more accurate model of reality.

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

 

[Jack]

Thank you very much, Steve.

Be careful! You said "actual 12 hour duration" and that is incorrect. The
actual duration is 12 days, period, accept it. It is essential that you
internalize the concepts as MS Project defines them (and MSP follows the
ANSI standard PMBOK definitions and practices very closely), not as you
think they should be defined <grin>. That being said, yes, if you split the
task the gaps are treated as non-working time and the duration would then be
shown as 12 hours.

Actually, the way you described the task initially, I'd strongly suggest you
make it three separate 4-hour tasks altogether and schedule each session as
an entity totally independent of the other two - there's nothing that says
similar or even identical tasks cannot occur many times during a project.
To me that is a far more accurate model of reality.

 

[GKV]

One of the things I want to do is gather estimates from people for a task and
then gather actual time taken. So there are 3 pieces of information I need
here: the duration (as defined in these posts), the estimated time (say 12
hours) and actual time taken (say 20 hours which I know I can capture in the
Actual Work field per task). However where would I capture the estimate?

Also it seems when I enter Actual Work, MS project updates the %complete and
duration automatically. How do I stop it from doing so?
GKV.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

You can stop it from updating the % complete in response to entering actual
work by going to the Tools menu, Options, item, and selecting the
Calculation tab and deselecting the first check box that says "Updating task
status updates resource status." But before you do, think it over and make
sure you really want to. If I have a task that requires 5 days to complete
with a resource assigned to it 100% it requires 40 man-hours of work. If my
resource does 8 hours work, he has done 1/5 of the task's required effort as
evidenced by producing 1/5 of the number of widgets the task is required to
produce and if he's working at the rate I thought he would he's spent 1/5 of
the time I'd figured it would take him to do it. The duration of the task
is 5 days, actual duration is 1 day, remaining duration is 4 days, task is
20% complete. If he's done 8 hours work and only made 1/10 of the required
widgets, my estimate of duration and work was off and should be revised to
reflect that it will require 10 days, not 5, to make all the widgets. I
post 8 hours actual work, actual duration is set to 1 day, I manually set
remaining duration to 9 days, task is calculated at 10% complete because
he's worked 1 day out of the total of 10 days it will require to do the
work.

DO NOT "MIX AND MATCH" TIME HOURS AND WORK HOURS!!! They are NOT the same
thing even though they both use the same unit of measure and they cannot be
freely interchanged with each other in the same fields. Be careful not to
mix them up accidentally or from expediency, either in the schedule or in
your own mind. I can't stress that strongly enough.

Project's schedule shows projected work and expected duration for things
that haven't happened, actual work and expended duration for things that
have happened. As such, it should normally be allowed to update duration
and % complete in order to best use the schedule as an effective management
tool. % complete is expended duration / required duration, if you need to
know percentage of the *work* that has been done, that's % Work Complete, a
different field altogether. % Complete and % Work Complete are not always
equal even though they often are. Remember too that there are Actual XX
fields corresponding to each "scheduled" field and that's where you post
what has happened - updating Actual Start will update Start and updating
Actual Duration can update duration but it's a one-way street and changing
the Start date or Duration field is NOT how you enter actual progress. So
how do you preserve your original estimates for comparison purposes, which
is what I think you are trying to do by wanting to turn off the updating?
After developing your projected schedule but before posting any actual
performance in it, save a baseline. That replicates the data fields into
baseline pigeon holes where they are protected against change. So in the
above example. The original plan shows 5 days duration, 40 hours work.
Saving a baseline copies that to the corresponding baseline fields. Now Joe
does 8 hours work and tells you he estimates that he'll be finished in 3
more days, not the 4 that was originally expected. You enter 8 hours in
Actual Work and Project updates Actual Duration to 1 day, you enter
Remaining Duration of 3 days, Project revises the total work estimate to 32
hours and the total duration estimate to 4 days - of which you have so far
worked one day - and the task is 25% complete. Meanwhile your baseline
retains the 5 day duration and the 40 hours work from your original
estimates so you have a record of that data to compare actual progress
against.


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