New Setup - "Working time" help requested

[ESmith]

I'm setting up a new Project Server and I want to define a "working day" as
5 hours ( leaving the rest as slack for all the unknown things that pop-up).

What I'd like to see is that when I define a task, for example, as starting
on Monday and finishing on Thursday as having a duration of 4 days. I've
been unable to figure out how to get this to work. I've tried setting
creating a template where I say the working hours are from 8am to 1pm (or
2pm to account for an hour lunch break?) and the hours per day and week to 5
and 25 respectively. All combinations fail - the system seems to be
calculating my "4" example above based on an 8 hour day regardless that I've
defined hours per day as 5.

How can I setup project to accept that my work day is 5 hours and allow me
to define start/finish times that account for only the 5 hour work day?

Thanks!

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

ESmith --

To set up a system according to your requirements, your Project Server
administrator should check out the Enterprise Global file and edit the
enterprise Standard calendar to show the 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM working schedule
for Monday through Friday. Then, you will need to ask your project managers
to make the following changes in EVERY current project they manage:

1. Open an enterprise project
2. Click Tools - Options - Calendar
3. Set the Hours per day value to 5 and set the Hours per week value to 25
4. Set the Default End Time value to 2:00 PM and click the Set as Default
button

Beyond this, I would strongly recommend that your Project Server
administrator change each enterprise project template file using the steps I
just specified. Do know this: when Microsoft Project calculates the
Duration of a task, the formula is:

Duration = Work/(Hours per Day x Units)

The Hours Per Day value is specified in each project in step #3 above. Hope
this helps.

 

[ESmith]

Dale,

Thank you very much for your response - I've tried that - here's a bit more
info:
Our goal is to plan a very large project where all of our developers have 5
hours a day available to them for working on the project and the remaining 3
will be for dealing with the other stuff that occurs in our business. This
other stuff is not tracked in any kind of project so we don't want those
three hours factored into anything with respect to our project plan.


In order to accomplish this goal we modified some of the time settings using
Click Tools - Options - Calendar and set the Hours per day value to 5 and
set the Hours per week value to 25. We have set the Default Start and End
Time value to 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM (it appears MS Project forces a lunch
hour - must be a union shop) and click the Set as Default button to be sure
these setting hold.

Next we set up a task to run from 2/26/07 to 2/26/07. The duration reads 1
day as you would expect, but the resource we have applied to the task shows
8 hours of work on their schedule. Next we change the task to run from
2/26/07 to 2/27/07 and the duration reads 2.6 days. We are assuming that
the program is adding to the first day an additional 1.6 days because it
will take 1.6 eight hour days to do a job if you are only working five hours
a day (8/5 = 1.6). Every time we extend the project another day using the
start and finish fields the duration increases another 1.6 days. This leads
us to believe there is another setting somewhere that we can't find.


In order to rule out that the setting was attached to our resource we both
deleted the resource and replaced the resource with a new previously
untasked resource and the duration problem continued giving us a 1day
duration on a project that begins and ends on the same day and increasing
the duration by 1.6 every time we extended the project for a day.

Does anyone know what is going on?



Thanks!

 

[JulieS]

Hi ESmith,

Pardon me for jumping in. I am by no means a server expert such as
Dale, but what you report indicates that the calendar in use for your
project (enterprise Standard) is not set to the 5 hours per day.

Did the server administrator alter the calendar as Dale suggested?

"To set up a system according to your requirements, your Project Server
administrator should check out the Enterprise Global file and edit the
enterprise Standard calendar to show the 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM working
schedule for Monday through Friday."

Although written for a non-server scenario, see FAQ #5 "Default Working
Hours" at:
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional information
about Microsoft Project

 

[luvtoscrab]

How do I set default start and end times for each page in the Outlook
calendar? For instance, I want only the period from 6 a.m. to midnight to
show on the calendar page. Right now the times on the page are from 12:00
a.m. to 11:59 p.m. But I generally enter nothing from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00
a.m., so much of the page is dead space and I have to scroll down to find the
first entry.

I am able to change the workweek times so that, for instance, 6:00a.m. to
11:59 p.m. is in another color, but the period from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.
still takes up space on the calendar.