Fixed Work question

D

David

I am struggling with Fixed Work. We are seeing recalculations of
duration where we are not expecting. For example, I have a project
that has a task that has 45 hours of work (9 hour calendar day), it
starts on Monday and ends on Friday, a Must Finish On Constraint, Fixed
Work, and one resource at 100%. In this particular example, Actual
Work of 2 hours was entered from a timesheet one week before the task
was scheduled to start. The end result in the Gantt view shows
duration of 52 hours and not 45 hours with are remaining work of 43
hours. The Task Usage view shows the duration with 45 hours and 43
hours remaining. Any ideas why the two views would be different? Our
PM group uses the Gantt view and the resource managers and accounting
groups use the Task Usage view causing some confusion.
We are running Project Pro 2003, with SP2.

Thanks.
 
G

Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]

David:

You're comparing apples and oranges. The task usage view deals in work, not
duration. 45-2 = 43

The Gantt chart does show duration and might show work as well. Duration
represents the elapsed working time from task start to task finish. When
posting less than a full day of work before a fixed-work task's scheduled
start, we'd expect that the duration would increase accordingly. In this
case, if the time was entered on Friday morning, duration is calculated from
Friday morning or ((9 hours X 6 working days) = 54) - 2 = 52 where the -2
value is the two hours on the following Friday that won't be required to
finish the fixed work task. In other words, your duration is 5.77 days. If
you display your duration in days, rather than hours, it might be less
confusing for your users. At least they'd be less likely to confuse work and
duration. Getting them into a good project training course might help as
well.

Your source of confusion is not understanding the meaning of duration and
how it is calculated. Duration expressed in hours does not equal work unless
all work is contiguous. Starting a task early, may increase duration, but
that's not necessarily a bad thing.
 
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