I think I'm missing a key tenet of MS Project and am hoping that
someone on the board can shed some light.
How does MS project represent 'work' and the allocation of resources to
'work'?
- What does the 'work' field actually represent?
- If a resource is allocated to a task and then removed, why does
'work' drop to 0?
Any help showing me the obvious would be appreciated.
j
Work represents the hours of effort it takes to accomplish the task.
Depending on how resources are assigned, it can vary significantly from
duration. If I have a task of 5d (40h) duration, and assign a single
resource to it, the work will be 40h. This might be for painting a room
or something. OTOH, I might have a task like calling someone to get
some information. It might take 5d to accomplish this, but only 5
minutes of effort during that week. When I assign the resource, I can
tell Project how much work the resource will do during the duration of
the task.
How project handles that information depends on 2 settings. Task Type,
which is "Fixed Work", "Fixed Duration", or "Fixed Units". The
relationship between them is Work = Duration x Units. If duration and
units are in different units, say days and hours, a conversion factor,
in this case 8, needs to be factored in appropriately.
Basically, using default settings, which would be Fixed Units, if you
change duration, work will change to keep the units constant, and vice
versa. Same with the other Task Types. The best way to understand all
this is simply to create a task, a few resources, and assign and remove
the resources while monitoing the variables. After a while, the
relationships become clearer.
The other variable is "Effort Driven". Basically, if this option is
turned on, when I ADD a resource to a task with resources already
assigned, it divvies up the work between them. Each resource I add
takes work from the others already assigned. If you remove resources,
the work is reassigned to the other resources still assigned.
It's a little complicated, but if you play with these settings for an
hour or 2, it'll start to make sense.
Hope this helps in your world.
