Resource usage on first day of work

[Craig Newman]

Dear All,
I'm having the following problem with Project 2000. I
have a task that is say 7 days, which I assign an
individual to work. The individual is 70% efficient with
the remaining 30% as overhead. To represent this
I have:
Actual Task: 7 days work with assign Individual[70%]
giving 10 days duration

To make sure that the individual overhead is not
allocated elsewhere I create a second task for the
duration period i.e.
Overhead: 10 days duration Individual[30%]

What I expect to see in the resource usage is:

Individual Day1 Day2 Day3 ... Day10
Actual Task: 0.7d 0.7d 0.7d ... 0.7d
Overhead : 0.3d 0.3d 0.3d ... 0.3d

But what I get is:
Individual Day1 Day2 Day3 ... Day10 Day11
Actual Task: 0.61d 0.7d 0.7d ... 0.7d 0.09d
Overhead : 0.26d 0.3d 0.3d ... 0.3d 0.04d

What I can't explain/fix is why Day1 is not fully
allocated. (Note: The individual is not assigned to
anything previous to this task). Anyone any ideas?
Thanks
Craig

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Craig,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

How many hours are there in the day? Is it still the default 8 hours? Why
not assign at 100% and then make the resource's
Max Units 70 %? You can then forget about overhead tasks.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on )

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Craig,

Your Calendar options do not match your Working time.
See FAQ 5: Default Working hours on
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm

HTH

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
Project Management Consultancy
Prom+ade BVBA
32-495-300 620

 

[Steve House]

Sure seems like a whole lot of effort for little real benefit. Why track
the overhead at all? Set the resource max units at 70%. When you enter the
task, you estimate the duration that the resource will take to do it based
on what you know about the way he actually works - from your example 10
days. Assign him to the task at 70% and you're done. Yes, the other 30% is
consumed by email, phone calls, etc - overhead. But so what? The job of
the PM is not to micro-manage the resource's workdays and his overhead is
not part of the project work in that it doesn't directly contribute to
completing the project deliverables. As far as the project microcosm is
concerned it simply doesn't exist. All that we really need to care about is
that when I put Billy Bob on this task, 10 days from when he starts work it
will be done and it will cost the project budget 7 man-days worth of his
labour cost.