Task Duration

[José Santos]

I know, from my experience, that some type of work takes let's say 3 days
with a work team working more than the normal hours.
When I insert this task in a project based in a standard calendar the
duration will be reduced. How can I avoid this?

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi José ,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

We need to know what data you are entering and where?

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

 

[José Santos]

Mike,

Thank you for you reply.
Just to clarify my question, let's give an example:
I know that task A as a duration of 4 days with 2 shifts (day and night)
working 24 hours.
The other project tasks are made mainly with the standard calendar.
I assigned a resource with the 24h calendar to that task.
When I insert this task with none calendar it appears the 4 days duration
but in the Gantt chart the duration will be 2 days and the resouce usage 16h
each day.
If I assign the standard calendar to the task the duration in the Gantt
chart will be 4 days but the resource usage will be 8h each day and in fact
what should be is 4 days with 24h of resouce usage each day. Isn't it?

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Remember that Project defines a "day" as an 8-hour (more properly, 480
minute) work period unless you change it. The task in your example requires
4 days, meaning 4 8-hour work periods. You could do it with 1 shift working
on 4 successive days or with 2 shifts working 2 successive days. BOTH work
assignment possiblities are 4 days duration. Remember that duration is NOT
the same measurement of time that clocks and wall calendars keep track of -
that's *elapsed time* which is quite different from duration. Duration is
defined as "the number of working time units as defined by the task's
calendar between when work commences and when it is completed." The work
may or may not be continuous, it doesn't matter. The basic working time
unit is the minute so the duration is the number of minutes between when
work starts and when it minutes that the calendar defines as working time
minutes. Your task requires 1920 minutes. Each block is 480 minutes is
arbitrarily labeled a "day." The calendar says WHICH minutes out of the
each 24 hour sunrise-to-sunrise day count as duration minutes. So when you
say the task requires 4 days duration, that doesn't necessarily correspond
directly to 4 numbers on the calendar on your wall - it really means 4 480
minute blocks. If work is done around the clock, each crew has a 1 hour
lunch period, and the task starts on Monday at 8am, 4 "days" will have
transpired on Tuesday at about 7 pm