Effort vs Duration

[matt]

I am new to project and this one has me stumped. When we estimate times for
our tasks, we always list effort vs duration. Duration is actual working
days until it is finished, whereas effort is the amount of time we actually
work on it. For example, our automated testing takes 3 days to complete,
but only 1 hour to setup. If I enter 3 days into duration, MS Project shows
my resource as busy for those three days, when they are really only busy for
one hour. Almost all of our tasks have this lag (such as review the
documents, where we wait 5 days to get comments back). The important thing
to note is that for these tasks, throwing more resources at them will NOT
lessen the duration, our test automation will always take 3 days...

I want my resources to be allocated better, so that when someone starts, for
example, the automated test, they can spend the next 3 days (minus 1 hour)
working on another task. However, I still want to capture the 3 day delay so
I can get the correct end-date for the project.

My guess is that I need to change something in the realm of "Fixed
Effort/Fixed Duration" etc, but I have not figured this out. Right now all
of my tasks are "Fixed Duration" and "Effort Driven"

What is the preffered method to enter and represent this information?

 

[John]

Matt,
It sounds like you are already there with regard to the task type (i.e.
Fixed Duration, effort driven). Project uses the following basic formula
for scheduling: Duration = Work/Resource (units). If you enter a 3 day
duration for the automated testing, you should also enter 1 hour into
the Work field for the manual setup. Project will then allocate the
resource to 4% which means that resource has 96% of his time to do other
tasks (assuming a full time employee working a normal standard calendar).

Hope this helps.
John

 

[Laurence Kelly]

Hello Matt,

there are two issues here, both of which are big MSP issues that have
confused everyone who has ever used MSP at some point (and probably
many times thereafter), so congratulations - as a newcomer to MSP you
are on the right track.

The first issue concerns the definition of individual tasks and their
resource assignments.

The second issue concerns how MSP calculates a resource-levelled
schedule.

The short answer to your question is;

- set your options so that all tasks are Fixed Duration and not
effort-driven, once you have done this MSP will not adjust the work or
duration you set
- update all your existing tasks to reflect this setting (you can
select them all & do this in one go)
- split your automated testing into two tasks, 1 task being 1 hour
setup with a resource assigned, the other being the rest of the 3 days
with no resource (isn't automated testing wonderful - presumably
someone will be checking to amke sure it didn't stop with a problem
after 5 minutes!).
- link these 2 tasks as straightforward start-finish.

The long answer to your question is that these two issues been
discussed many many times in this forum and elsewhere, do some
searches on "effort driven" and "levelling", you will find thousands
of relevant posts. You will also find that there are many ways to
achieve the same end in MS-Project, and that MS-Project's levelling is
not great, and that there are big differences across different
versions of MSP as functionality has evolved, and there are
fundamental debates about the best way to schedule tasks. If you have
the time to do this, you might find a different answer or even a
different question.

Hope that helps,

Laurence Kelly

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Matt,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

You might like to have a look at my series on Microsoft Project in the
TechTrax ezine, particularly #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

 

[matt]

Thanks to everyone for your help. The solutions here seem to vary in
complexity, with Johns being the simplest. I will try it first and if I have
issues, try the others. I added the "Work" column and have been changing
the work amount and telling Project "Dont Decrese the Duration" (is this a
global setting somewhere?).

Unfortunately, I left my real estimates of time at the office, and I wont be
going in until next week, so it wont be until then when I can state which
solution worked.

Thanks again!

 

[matt]

Mike,

Great site. I will be spenidng some time over the Thanksgiving break
reading through these articles!

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Matt,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

You might like to have a look at my series on Microsoft Project in the
TechTrax ezine, particularly #1-TaskTypes, 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

 

[John]

Matt,
Unfortunately there are no absolutes in Project. And I agree with
Laurence's assessment in that the basic scheduling equation used by
Project (Duration = Work/Resources) has so many permutations that its
implementation can drive even seasoned users nuts (I'm nuts by the way).
Even with Fixed Duration tasks, there are conditions when Project will
insert itself (an undesired feature in my opinion) and adjust duration.
When this does happen the user just needs to remember that Project is a
tool, it operates on a set of rules but not all rules are always
applicable and the user must make the final decisions.

The only global setting for Fixed Duration is under
Tools/Options/Schedule tab. However, individual tasks can be set to any
of the three task types just to make life interesting. By the way, the
default for the global setting is Fixed Units. I wish Project had a
setting for "Don't change Duration no matter what" but it doesn't.

With regard to adding the Work field. This should be a basic field for
entering data any time a project is created with Fixed Duration task
types. Given you don't run into one of the conditions noted above, you
should be able to achieve what you need with the suggestions I gave
originally.

Hope this helps.
John