Changing Actual Overtime Work has wierd effects

[Shaun Wilson]

I am trying to set Project up at work to use overtime and have come across a
problem. FYI, all the employees work 40 hour weeks and have overtime rates
(after the 8 hours). Overtime is a random thing though, people do it when
they need to as long as they can.

My company estimates the length of our tasks in hours(work), so to
accomodate this I have changed the project default task type to "Fixed Work".
In the Entry table I added the field Work, and we enter the estimates into
this field (instead of the duration field). The duration defaults to "1day?"
and when we assign a work resource and (it sees their calander is an 8 hour
day) the duration increases as it should. eg a 36 hour task would say "1day?"
then when we assign bob it increases to "4.5days?". This is okay (although if
there is a way for it to automatically presume 4.5 that would be good).

Moving on, as each day passes we need to enter the times everyone worked
into the Task Usage view.
At first, I tried showing the Actual Work field and adding the time into
this. This worked good for reducing the duration, but could not work out the
overtime. So in my example, bob would do 10 hours actual on day 1 and day 5
would reduce to 2 hours.
I then (using a new test project) tried using the Actual Overtime Work field
as well to get the overtime cost to calculate. I would put 8 hours in Act.
Work and then 2 hours in Act. Overtime Work. This would then update Act. Work
to 10 hours and reduce day 5 to 2 hours. The overtime cost would also be
calculated. This is all good, however if I tried changing the 2 hours
overtime to 1 hour, the Work field on the next 4 days would change to 8.3,
8.3, 8.3, 2.08. My Work for this task is still 36hours, but why is it saying
to do part hours on the other days instead of saying 8, 8, 8, 3?
I also tried (in another new test) to use the Regular Work field, as after
some googling I discovered Actual Work = Regular Work + Overtime Work.
However, this has the problem. I also noticed that on the 2nd to 4th days
(5th similar with different values), the Regular Work would say 8 whilst the
Work would be 8.3. If i changed the Work to 8, Regular Work would drop to
7.7), and the task Work would drop to 35.7.

Anyone care to shed some light? I'm thinking this might be something to do
with the resource max units % thing (which I have not touched). Also, this
does not happen if you increase the overtime.

Shaun.

 

[Steve House]

Careful of several things. First off, you said "My company estimates the
length of our tasks in hours(work), so to accomodate this I have changed the
project default task type to "Fixed Work." The length of a task is NOT its
work but rather its duration. Duration measures time while work measures
effort. Assuming they're all fully committed to the task at hand, 1 person
working on 1 task lasting for 8 hours does 8 man-hours of work, 2 people
working together on the same task lasting 8 hours do 16 man-hours of work, 3
people working together for 8 hours of time do 24 man-hours of work, and so
forth.

"Fixed Work" does NOT mean the estimated work required for a task never
changes. What it means is that if you change the resource assignment the
duration will change but not the total work man-hours and conversely a
change to duration will change the resource percentages and not the work
estimate. If your task is Fixed Work estimated at 40 man-hours, 1 person
assigned 100%, its duration will be 5 days and if you manually edit the work
to 32 man-hours, Project behaves as if the task is Fixed Units and changes
the duration to 4 days.

Project never assumes any portion of the work is done in overtime - you have
to explictly tell it if it is. You would think that if the resource
calendar says he works 8 hours per day and you enter him as doing 10 hours
of work on a given day Project would distribute it as 8 hours regular work
and 2 hours of overtime but that's just not the way it works. To enter
actual overtime performed, you need to use one of the Usage views, right
click on the right hand half of the screen and add a line for Actual
Overtime Work. If the 8-hour resource works 10 hours on a given day on a
particular task, you need to enter it by showing 10 hours on the Actual Work
line and 2 hours on the Actual Overtime Work line - Project won't
automatically apportion it for you. The reason is a given resource could be
more than one individual - we might not need to break the resources down to
individual names and instead we could show 5 carpenters as an 'aggregate
resource' called Carpenters with a max units of 500%. Putting "Carpenters -
200%" on a task means you have two guys assigned. So does entering Actual
Work of 10 hours for a task mean that you had one guy doing 8 hours straight
time plus 2 overtime or does it mean you had 2 guys each doing 5 hours of
straight time? Only you know so it's up to you to tell Project how it
should distribute the hours. The Actual Work field is the total including
overtime, the Actual Overtime Work field is the portion of Actual Work that
was done in overtime. Order of entry matters - if you put 8 in actual work,
then 2 in actual overtime work Project recalculates Actual work to 10 hours,
8 standard + 2 OT. But if you reverse the order, putting 2 in Actual
Overtime, then 8 in Actual Work Project does NOT override your entry and
show 10 hours total - instead it takes you at your word, a total of 8
distributed as 6 hours regular plus 2 hours OT.

Duration is defined as the clock time required to do the work, that is, work
done during the working time calendar. Work done in overtime, ie hours
outside of the calendar's definition of working hours, doesn't count against
(or for) duration. Assuming an 8-hour resource assigned 100%, a task
requiring 40 man-hours of work done in regular time will have a duration of
40 hours, ie 5 days. But the same 40 man-hours total work task done as 32
hours regular time plus 8 hours overtime will have a duration of 32 hours,
or 4 days. Same applies to actuals - if the task was schedule as 5 days
without overtime being scheduled in advance and I enter Actual Work of 40
hours the duration won't change. But if I enter it explicitly including 8
hours OT the duration will change to 4 days (ie, 32 hours).

As for why the remaining work distribution is being recontoured they way it
is in your example, not quite sure why it's doing that, I've got to
experiment a bit with it.

Hope this helps a bit.