Tasks fixed hours/day

[Noël Thoelen]

Is there a way to enter a task where a fixed nbr of hours is allocated to a
resource. I do not want project to reschedule the work for that task ?
Example : project management costs 1hr of work each day.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Assign your resource at 12% to have it schedule one hour of work a day.
Make the task Fixed Effort. Unless you edit the task, project will always
put it at one hour a day. If you increase the duration, Project will change
the total work but keep it one hour per day none-the-less.

Steve House [MVP]

 

[Noël Thoelen]

Thanks Steve

This works fine. Is there a way to keep the work scheduled for one hour per
day for that specific task when i use the leveling tool in order to
reschedule work ?

 

[JackD]

If you want anything else to be scheduled in addition to that one hour a day
task, you will need to make sure that the units for the other tasks are
equal to the resource availability - 1 hour per day. If you don't then they
will all be pushed to the end of that task. You can either reduce the units
on the task or boost the availability (on the resource sheet) to 113%.
Project will not stack tasks to exceed availability even if this means
under-utilization of the resources.

 

[StevenB]

I have a question on a related topic.
I am a PM for a design firm and I have a situation I have been beating my
brains out over.
I have estimated my designer will take 200 hours to complete a task. I have
given him a time span of 6 months to complete this task. The task has a
calander timeframe, but the costs are based on the hours he has worked on the
project. We are about 2 months into the project and has used up about 90
hours. The task however is about 80 percent done.
My question is one of cost tracking and estimated costs to complete this task.
I would like to show actual percent complete, actual hours worked, actual
accrued costs for work performed (based on a $/HR rate) to date and an
estimated cost to completion.
Is it possible to have all these fields on one chart at the same time?
What would be the best way to set this up?

Thanks a ton if you can help.
Steve

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

When you are 2 months into a task with 6 months duration and have done 90
out of an estimated 200 man-hours of work, you simply cannot be 80% done as
Project usually defines completion metrics. Project's % Complete refers to
duration and ONLY duration, thus 2 months out of 6 months scheduled puts the
task at 33% Complete, by definition. Then there's %Work Complete - 90
man-hours worked out of 200 man-hours required put the task at 45% Work
Complete. For you to be 80% Complete probably means the work and duration
were both overestimated and you have done 90 man-hours with about 23-23
man-hours remaining and it'll take you a little over 2 more weeks to do it
and should revise your estimated total work and duration accordingly.

The fields you want to see are all available in the usage views or can be
added to Gantt chart tables. Even more importantly, assuming you have saved
a baseline before posting in your actuals, you can display the Earned Value
tables and see all that data as of any status date you choose. Look under
Earned Value in help for details.

As an aside, this points up why I try to discourage using duration as the
timeframe the task has in which to be completed. Project best practices
says that once a resource starts on a task they generally should devote
their full attention to it unless there's compelling reasons or conflicting
demands on their time that make that impossible. If your designer works an
8 hour day on average and you expected this task to require 200 man-hours
work, it really should have been scheduled with a duration of about 25 days
or 5 weeks with a deadline 6 months away if that's when it needs to be done
by.

 

[StevenB]

Thanks for your comments Steve,
The fact of the matter is that in the exhibit design industry, the design
company creates preliminary work, gives it to the client for revisions and
back and forth so much that I had to give a lot of time on the calander.
What I was really looking to show the investors on this project was the
earned value of having spent a little more money on hireing a new "hot shot"
designer that made this particular job go very well.
I did not know that the tracking metrix of Project was so stringent that it
wouldn't let me ascape the set confines of some of the fields.
You have been a big help and I want to thank you for your time.
Steve

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

I understand, but that cycle is not just one task. It is, in fact, a series
of tasks that have waiting times between them. The designer creates a draft
and submits it to the client. Then you wait for the client approval. If
it's approved, cool. But if it's not, you revise the design. That's a
sequence of several linked tasks with lag times between them to cover the
waiting times. The total sequence may take 6 months, but creating the
preliminary design (for example) is a concrete task that might take, say,
one week. Remember the definition of a task is a body of work with a
specific and observable start and end time that produces ONE single
deliverable. In your example, the preliminary design is one deliverable,
the client revisions are another deliverable, incorporating the revisions is
another deliverable, and the final design is yet another deliverable - at
LEAST 4 discrete tasks, probably many more.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer/Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs