Best way to enter part time resources

[Kay]

Dear all,

I have a question, what the best way to enter part time resources is.
Situation:
I have one resource who is working 80% and we can be sure he never
works on wednesdays.
He has two major duties which are split 50% and 30%.

I considered the following:
a) I enter him as 100% and use the resource calendar to mark the
wednesdays as non-working time
b) I enter him as 80% (feels more right), leave the resource calendar
untouched
c) I enter him as 80% and mark his absence on wednesdays in the
resource calendar.

So I entered one of his 50% tasks (10 dayw working time, fixed work)
under setup a:
It calculates 20 days duration

Setup b:
It also calculates 20 days duration but shifts the end date a week to
the front

Setup c:
It calculates 20 days duration and puts the delivery date on the same
date as a.

So what is the right way doing it?

Regards
Kay

 

[Steve House]

You've rasied a thorny issue. Part of your (and many others) confusion is
in what we mean when we say a resource has 80% availability and what we mean
when we say a resource is "part-time." The assignment percentage
fundamentally is the rate at which the resource converts time into work - if
he is distracted so it takes 8 hours for him to do the work he COULD have
done in 4 hours without the distractions, we'd say he's working at 50%. If
I assign a resource to a 1 day (8-hour) duration task at 75%, that does NOT
mean the task takes 6 hours. It means that *8* hours of time will elapse
between when it start and when it ends but IF we had been able to clear
everything else off the resource's plate, he would have been able to do it
in 6 - it was 6 Full Time Equivalent man-hours of work spread out over 8
hours of time.

So to your part-timer ... is he a full-time employee physically present and
able to work 8 hours per day but with a lot of conflicting obligations on
his plate or is a true part-timer who is only physically on the property and
able to work for some portion of each normal workday/workweek?

If your resource is a full-timer who is unable to devote his undivided
attention to the tasks at hand, use the regular calendar and reduce his
maximum allocation to take into account the percentage of his time that will
be consumed by non-project related duties. If his maximum is 75% and you
assign him to a task requiring 6 man-hours of work, those unspecified
conflicts means it will take him 8 hours start to finish time to complete
it. If he's a true part-timer, working say M-T and Th-F 1pm to 5pm but when
he's on the property and you use him, he will be your's and your's alone and
you can use him without any conflicting distractions, create a calendar
reflecting his actual hours of work and show him available a max of 100% -
the 100% meaning he's available to you without conflict for his entire
scheduled shift. It DOESN'T mean 100% of the company's workday, it means
100% of HIS workday.


--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs