To my understanding (and as it reads in MS Project help!),
"work is the effort required to do a task." The calculation used by
MS Project to determine work, duration and units is
Duration * Units = Work
1) If you set the duration to be fixed, Project will determine the units
and work for you. This might be useful if you have a task that you
know will absolutely take two weeks, for instance (printing a manual,
for instance). You might not care who works on it, when, or how much,
but you know it will take two weeks.
2) If you set the the units to be fixed, you will be able to set the
percentage
share of time that each resource assigned to your task will work on it.
Maybe you want Greg to work 50% and Estefan to work 50% on drawing
blueprints, for instance. For this scenario, setting the task as "fixed
units" will let you
specify the percentage share, and Project will calculate the duration
and the number of hours of work for you.
3) If you set the work to be fixed, Project will figure out how long
the task will take and allocate the resource work share based on this.
For instance, you might want Erin and Rick to both spend twelve hours
on a task.
I've uploaded a very simple sample of the above to my website, so that
you can see how this works in actual practice.
http://www.jchap.net/project/duw.mpp
I'd recommend using the task form (split window) and experimenting with
the task type, work and duration fields to see how this works.
Hopefully this helps...
- Jeff Chapman
