Barb PMO said:
I'm trying to use a recurring task to schedule a block of work for 6 months.
The scenarios is 50 hrs of remaining work for a resources, 1.92h of work a
week. The person has a budget (of 8.33h a month) and they can "spend" it a
little every day or whatever (depending on the client needs).
When I create the recurring task, and set the Duration to 1.92h ('cause the
help says, 'This duration is the length of the individual recurring task, not
the total length for all recurring tasks.')
Actual Results: I get a total of 14.45h of remaining work.
Expected results: I need that to be 50h of remaining work.
What am I doing wrong?
Barb,
Well first of all let's clarify the difference between duration and
work. They are not the same thing. Duration is the time span during
which a task is performed. Work is the effort one or more resources will
spend actually doing the task. If a resource is assigned 100% to a task
then the duration and work will have the same value. Most of the time
however, this is not the case.
Also don't confuse the term "remaining work" with "work". In Project
Remaining Work is a field describing, well, the work remaining after
some amount of actual work has been performed. Obviously at the
beginning of a task the Remaining Work equals the Work. Thereafter,
Remaining Work = Work - Actual Work.
OK, now let's look at your scenario. What you have is a budget of 50
hours over a 6 month period for an unspecified task or set of tasks.
What you do NOT have is a recurring task. A recurring task is typically
a meeting every Wednesday for 6 months, publishing a monthly newsletter
on the 3rd Friday of each month, providing landscaping maintenance to
Henderson's yard every other week on Friday, etc. Your tasks are neither
planned (i.e. based on client's needs) nor recurring.
Depending on the way the contract is set up with the client, you may
want to simply create a single 6 month Fixed Duration (non-effort
driven) task with a total work content of 50 hours. On the other hand,
if the contract limits the amount of work to 8.33 hours per month, then
you probably want to set up 6-one month Fixed Duration tasks with 8.33
hours of work each month. Either way, forget about trying to break
things down as so many hours per day. My guess is there really isn't a
limitation on the number of hours per day and when worked on a daily
basis the round off error will likely drive you nuts (it already has).
Hopefully this has provided some insight and help.
John
Project MVP
