task resource allocation discrepancy: 0hrs<>80%

[David Wanless]

I'm using Project Standard 2003.

I have a 300 task project file. On many tasks, I have allocated myself
(David Wanless) as resource at a rate of 80%. However, many of these now
have a work value of 0hrs. How can a task of duration 5 days have a resource
allocated at 80% for 0hrs?

Note that other resources are allocated to the same task. Some of their
work values are also wrong, although not 0.

If I create a new task with all the same resources allocated, it calculates
my Work value as 30h, matching the 80% of my time.

Is there any way I can get Project to recalculate the Work values for all
resources allocated to all tasks on the basis of their Duration and the Unit
allocations?

Any other suggestions? I desperately do not want to have to recreate every
task in the project.

David.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi David,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

A lot depends on how and when you allocate resources. You might like to have
a look at my series on Microsoft Project in the TechTrax ezine, particularly
#5-Working With Resources and #10-Multiple Resource Assignments, at this
site: http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc or this:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&AUTH=23
(Perhaps you'd care to rate the article before leaving the site,
Thanks.)

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

 

[David Wanless]

Hi Glen,

I've read a couple of your articles, thanks, and they were good for my
general understanding of Project's resource allocation.

They don't explain how I could ever have been given a 0hrs allocation, but
at least they give me a slightly less drastic solution than recreating my
whole project plan. It seems I can remove all the resource allocations and
re-enter them, which will take a few hours but be a lot better than
recreating the whole document. I wish there was a way of just telling it to
redo the Work calculations for the existing resource assignments, based on
their % allocation.

I am still worried though about how this situation occurred in the first
place, and whether it might indicate a nasty database corruption somewhere.
I did at one stage have one task which blew the whole project out to 2039. I
deleted and recreated it and everything seemed alright at the time, but I
later found the 0hrs problem scattered throughout the document.

Thanks again for your advice,

David.

 

[David Wanless]

(Oops: should have been Mike, not Glen. My apologies.)

 

[Mike Glen]

No problem, Dave

I haven't come across this zero hours problem. You have Calculation turned
I suppose - Tools/Options.../Calculation tab/Calculation Mode set to
Automatic?

I suppose it could be corruption, you could try the suggestions in FAQ Item:
43. File Bloat? - Might be Corruption.

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
Project MVP

 

[David Wanless]

Dear Mike,

Thanks for that. I tried the 'File Bloat? - Might be Corruption' ideas, but
no luck. The problem persisted.

In the end I got around the problem by deleting all resource allocations in
the entire project and recreating them. Very tedious, but it worked.

I did later see the same zero hour problem turn up when I manually changed a
duration for one of the tasks, so I backed out of that very quickly. There's
a lot to know about resource allocation!

Thanks,

David.

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome, David, glad you found a solution, even if it was tedious

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP