Be very very careful - Work and Duration are two totally different (though
related) measures even though they're both listed in hours and you need to
make sure you always compare apples to apples and oranges to kangaroos <g>.
Work measures the amount of effort required to produce the project's
outcome, it's what you pay people to do and your client or customer pays you
to achieve for him. Work hours are a measure of sweat. Duration is the
length of time over which the work is accomplished. It extends from the
instant work first is done and until the instant work is finished but
completely ignores whether the work is continuous or how many people are
working during that time period. Duration hours measure the passage of time
during which work could have been done, without regard to how much of it
actually was done or not. If Joe spends an hour painting a wall on Monday
morning, then lets it dry until late Tuesday afternoon when he comes back to
spend an hour finishing all the trim, the duration of the painting task will
be 16 hours but the work would be 2 hours. OTOH, if you have 3 guys working
together on something all day Monday, the duration will be 8 hours but the
work will be 24.
You know your project and obviously I don't but I will say this - although
the total length of the project, the distance between the start date and the
end date, is certainly important, in 99.99% of projects, the arithmetic sum
of the task durations is a completely meaningless number and corresponds to
the project's overall duration only by rare accident. On the other hand,
the sum of work - the hours you're paying for - is very very important.
