Calendar - Standard vs. 6.5 hour

[JAckie]

We set up a new calendar in MP 2000 that uses a 6.5 hour
work day. All the resources assigned to the project also
use the 6.5 hour calendar. When you click Tools/Options
and choose the calendar tab it also shows a working day of
6.5 hours. Now to the questions. Under Project/Project
Information, what should the calendar be set to? Should
that also reflect the 6.5 hour calendar or the Standard
calendar of and 8 hour workday? One of the project
managers thought this should stay with the Standard
calendar. Will the calculation on the calendar be thrown
off if one or the other calendars are used?

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello Jackie,
Of course, you have to set the Project/Project Information calendar to your
6.5 hour calendar.
For more information, look at this link :
FAQ #5 : Default Working hours
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm#Default Working Hours

Gérard Ducouret

 

[Lars Hammarberg]

Why plan according to a calendar no-one's working after?
The only reason I can think of letting the project calendar remain on 8
hours is if you want to compare this project to others running that
calendar.

What's more important is the setting under tools/options/calendar!

If you don't match that one up to the calendar used in your projects, you'll
end up with HUGE amounts of timephased data.
E.g.:
ActualCost for just one day when calendar is 6.5 h and Project thinks a day
is 8 hours:
Six 1-hour timeslots 0800-1500 (1200-1300= lunch)
+ thirty 1-minute slots for 1500-1530
= 36 slots for storing just actualcost for one day instead of 1 slot for the
entire days worth.
And there's cost, work, actualwork, baseline1cost, baseline6work,
remainingavailability,... (you get the picture)
I've seen a calendar detailed as 39 h/week= 7h48min/day with a lunch break
of just under a full hour. That calendar was used for projects running over
several years resulting in a small project ending up with a file size of
26MB when saved in mpp format, as the corresponding setting under
tools/options/calendar was stil on 8h/d 40h/wk
Try saving that one out to XML format or expand timephased data in the
database and you'll have to wait over 50 minutes(!) for a simple save... I
have no idea how long it will take to open it up in project again as one
night and the better part of the day after didn't suffice!

 

[Steve House]

I think the Project Calendar should reflext the work schedule of a generic
"typical" resource so in your case I'd go along with the notion that the 6.5
hour calendar should be used. You did remember to take into account
lunches, etc as non working time didn't you? Also, set the days per week
and hours per day in the Options Calendar page to agree with the Project
Calendar