Help With Non Working Time

[El Barto Dude]

I have an 8 hrs day - 40 Hrs a week project. But of those 8 Hrs, we only do
work 6 Hrs.

How am I suppose to represent this using project manager 2003.

I want so that every task understands that even that there are 8 hrs day,
only 6 hrs will be always be use when assigning the tasks to a resource.

José

 

[Patrick Allmond]

Change the working hours from 8-5 to 8-3 ?

 

[Joe]

I would allocated each resource at 75% for all assignments. This way you
know, for example, that a 32 hour task (of work) will take 5 days (duration).

Joe

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello El Barto,

Assign the resource at 75% (Units = 75% or 0,75)

Gérard Ducouret

 

[El Barto Dude]

Thank U Guys!!!

 

[John Sitka]

What do you do the other 2 hours?

 

[El Barto Dude]

We assume the employee has to go to the bathroom, get ready for work. Take a
break, go smoke, other issues not related to the project, etc...

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

I think I would ignore those non-working hours and just consdier that a task
the takes 1 day represents 8 hours of work, even though those hours are
really not being done at 100% efficiency. My reasoning is based on where
you most likely come up with duration estimates in the first place. Let's
say the task in this project is to polish 1000 fids - how do I know how long
that should take? Most likely I'll look back on what we've done in years
past and find that in last year's project it took us 10 hours to polish 100
fids. So for this year I'll probably assume it will take us about 100 hours
to polish the 1000 required this go araound, 10 time more. But when we
*did* that work last year the people doing it spent some time smokin' and
jokin', checking email, going potty, etc. So that 10 hour duration we have
in our records actually is the total of the productive time and the time
lost to non-productive activities. If we use it to estimate this year's
task duration we can probably assume the same proportion of lost time as we
had before and so that 100 hour we come up with already takes into account
we're really getting 75% efficiency. Since it's not our job as PM's to
micromanage our resource's day, if we just ignore the fact that "8 hours of
work" in our project plan is really 6 hours procuctive time and 2 hours
non-productive time, our schedule will work out just fine.

 

[John Sitka]

Mark these resources as having working calendars of 6 hours a day.
But as Steve House points out if those two vapor hours are known to exist as a portion of the 100% units
universally across the estimate then it disappears.
My way if a unique resource gives up smoking or has an iron bladder then their calendar can
be changed to 7 hours a day. Also when it comes to tracking... if an 8 hour task is reported as having 6 hours progress
made on it with remaining work = 0 this is not a failure of your ability to plan just that your estimate was adjusted
accurately as the course of future events runs out. That is more straight forward than filling a project with resource units of
percentages under 100% since when 100% allocation is used the timeline calculation is simply clear case of add and
subtract to make packets to drop into slots on a timeline on a one to one basis, it is much easier to understand.
Just look at the thousands of posts in the newsgroup similar to "I want my resource to be 75% on this 10% on this and 15% on this
but it is not working." These posts don't come from individuals who are getting desired results but rather ones that
are frustrated and confused.