Recurring Tasks, Fixed Duration, and assigning Resources

L

Leviathant

I have a question that I have not found a clear answer to via google
groups nor the MS PDF files, and was hoping to get a hand with.

Let's say I have a recurring task that takes 6h over 5d to do,
starting on the 15th of every month. So in the "Recurring Task
Information" box, I set duration to 5d, Recurrence pattern to 15th day
of every month, for 12 months. I let tasks schedule around holidays
and weekends, and now have a recurring task in my task list.

The summary task for the recurring task lists the duration as 243d
with fixed duration. Here's where my question comes in to play. When
I assign a resource to this task with the little People button, it by
default sets them up to have 40h workweeks, being 100% units of a 5d
duration. Currently, I just change the units to a percentage that
comes close to what the actual work hours are.

Is there a more clever way to go about this? I'd like it so that if
the Resource does 6h of work over 5d on this task, the task is then
100% complete.

Thanks;

--matt dunphy
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

Matt --

I would approach your problem as follows:

1. Select the recurring task
2. Click the Assign Resources button on the Standard toolbar
3. In the Assign Resources dialog, type 15% in the Units column for each
resource assigned to the task

Assigning a resource at 15% Units over a 5-day Duration task yield 6 hours
of Work for each resource. That is the most clever way I can figure out to
do what you wish. Hope this helps.
 
J

JLB

1. Create the task (basically, I just followed your steps).
2. Open the summary task so you can see all occurances.
3. Click on the first occurance.
4. Shift+Click on the last occurance to select all occurances.
5. Alt+F10
6. Select the resource
7. Click the Assign button.
8. Click the Close button.

JLB
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

JLB --

You are duplicating his problem rather than solving his problem. Your steps
will result in the resources being assigned at 100% Units, which is not what
he wants.
 
J

JLB

At some point he must have changed the work for each task to 6 hours. I know
he doesn't mention that he does this but, clearly, he has to do it so that he
can record in the schedule that there are 6 hours of work for each of the
repeating 5-day tasks.

So ... for the detail minded:

2.2 Insert the Work column
2.4 Set Work for each task to 6 hours.

As he said "Currently, I just change the units to a percentage that
comes close to what the actual work hours are."

This automatically sets the %units to 15% (in this case). If there are
variations on the the numbers, MSP will, of course, calculate the appropriate
percentage. In your example, you have to calculate it for each variation on
the theme. In my reply, I let MSP do the calculation.

JLB
 
L

Leviathant

Thanks to everyone for your responses to both posts I made yesterday.

This is the solution I came up with as well. I thought I had a pretty
good idea of the relationship between units, work, and duration, but I
guess I'm still wrapping my head around the logic :) Perhaps Project
will make more sense as I have more actual projects entered, and am
less reliant on keeping certain values static. Fascinating program!
I get the feeling that just like some of the audio software I work on,
I'll still be learning new things about it.

The idea that allocating someone 100% to three different 1 hour tasks
puts a resource at 300% allocation still befuddles me, as if Project
isn't accounting for the different hours in the day... even though it
tells me that resource has five remaining hours that can be allocated.

The recurring tasks feel kind of sloppy, and using them for reporting
feels like it might be more of a chore than (I think) it should be,
but then I understand that a calendar task like this isn't really the
main focus of Project, and that for all the other wonderful things it
does, I don't expect it to be perfect at all single, particular tasks.

Well, the more I pound away at this program, the better I understand
it, but again I appreciate the help you've given along the way :)

--Matt Dunphy
 
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