Resources & Nonworking Time

[MCKIL]

Hi,

i am experiencing a problem with Project 2007 and was hoping someone i
this community could help. Alas my installation of Project is not i
English so i hope i get all the terms right:

I want to add employee vacations to my project file and have so far
done this via resource calendar. All tasks of the project have a fixe
duration and are not effort driven. When adding a nonworking day for
colleague i don't want Project to change the start, end or duration o
the task but to spread the time over the remaining days of the task fo
this resource.

For example: If a task has a duration of 5 days and the employee take
one day off during this time Project should add 25 Percent workload t
each of the remaining 4 days.
I need the information to clear resulting overtime.

Thanks,

MCKI

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

MCKIL --

That's not how the software works, and I'm not aware of any way to force it
to work the way you want it to work. Sorry.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

As Dale said, that's jkust not how it works. Remember that a tasks duration
is "the number of working-time units between when a task begins and when it
ends" and Project ALWAYS uses minutes as the working time unit. If a task's
duration is Mon 8am to Fri 5pm, its duration is 2400 minutes. If the
resource takes a vacation day on Wednesday, that day becomes non-working.
Now there are only 1920 working time units between Mon 8am and Fri 5pm and
if Project left it at that the duration would have become less than it was.
In order for the duration to remain the same, it has to add another working
day after Friday. To keep the duration the same, it has to schedule work on
Monday.

You have said the task is fixed duration - while that setting doesn't
actually affect this particular calculation, what you're seeing is exactly
that behaviour ...

Monday 8am to Friday 5pm with no vacation time is 5 day's duration.
Monday 8am to Friday 5pm with a vacation day on Wednesday is 4 day's
duration, not 5. Wednesday isn't counted in the duration.
A 5-day task starting Monday 8am with a vacation day on Wednesday ends the
next Monday at 5pm. That's 5 day's duration, not 6.

For the task to be fixed duration, time equal to the new non-working time
must be added to the end of the task to keep the total amount of working
time between start and finish constant. What you're describing you want to
see is not fixed duration, it could be called "fixed elapsed time" but
that's a notion that doesn't actually exist in Project.

Continuing with the 5 day example: Project will not add the 25% to the
other 4 days because it has no idea that overtime could even be possible -
if it is, that's always a human decision made by the PM and entered
manually. Until you tell it differently by assigning overtime, it assumes
the resource can only be there for the 8 hours defined in his calendar ...
period. Starting with our Monday 8am to Friday 5pm task, mark Wednesday
non-working in the resource calendar. The finish will extend to be Monday
5pm but the duration is still 5 days. Now to get the overtime to happen,
after marking the vacation day as non-working, split the screen and in the
bottom window to display the Task Form, right click and select Resource Work
to display. In the Overtime Work column enter 8 hours. When you do, you'll
see the duration will drop to 4 days and the finish will come back to Friday
at 5pm, your original elapsed time being restored. The 8 hours of overtime
is work done at times outside of the normal working time calendar, by
definition, and so doesn't count towards the duration numbers. The total
work remains constant and what was 5 days duration with 40 hours of work
done now becomes 4 days duration with a total of 40 hours of work done.

Hope this helps

 

[vanita]

Hi

MS Project doesn't do it automatically. But for any such task the extra work
that is left could be taken as overtime work as ultimately the resource has
to work overtime to complete the task in planned duration. It could be
allocated in Resource usage view after inserting the column of 'Overtime
work'.

I hope it helps

Vanita