Actually I did try it and I got similar results as you did. I'm still
trying to figure out why. Even more intersting, mine shows the task splits
for 24 hours right at the end of the actual progress point. Not only that,
when I do some stuff in another file, close open files, and open the test
xml file again, the duration becomes 6.67 days. Note that reading the xml
is not a standard file open in the same sense as opening an mpp. Instead it
is importing the xml into a new project file. Not an xml guru so at this
point your guess is as good as mine as to what is really going on. My guess
is that the default calendar and work hours is in effect while the task data
is imported then the calendar information and settings from the xml file
come in and overwrite the defaults after the task numbers are already stored
but that's only a guess.
By the way, you mentioned setting the hours per day, hours per week, etc.
Keep in mind that those are actually conversion factors for duration units.
Duration is always actually stored in the database in working time units,
strictly speaking an integer value of 6 second "ticks" since 01/01/84. For
practical purposes though we can think of the data as being stored in
minutes to the nearest tenth. When you enter a task duration as "3 days" or
"2 weeks" for example, that entry is converted to minutes for storage in the
database. The hours per day or hours per week entry controls the
conversion. Whenever you see duration *displayed* it is being read in
minutes and converted back to the desired display units by the same factors.
An intersting experiment is to use the default 8 hours per day setting and
enter a 1 day task, while observing the times it shows scheduled. You'll
see duration is 1 day, task start 8am, task ends 5pm. Then change the
options setting to 7 hours per day. Now the same task still shows start at
8am and end at 5pm but the duration is now 1.14 days because you've changed
the definition of a "day." As I explain to my classes, the calendar (Tools,
Change Working Time) defines *which* of the minutes count towards duration
but changing "hours per day" etc, does not change the calendar and is only
there for convenience.
An alarm bell went off when you said you set "days per month" to 31. That's
not true - calendar months can have 28, 29, 30, or 31 days but even that
isn't the whole story. That setting, as discussed above, is also a
conversion so that I can enter a duration of "3 months" and Project can
figure out how many workdays that encompases and thus in turn the number of
work minutes the task is worth. A 31 day month usually does not have 31
working days in it - people do get time off and the off days don't count.
The days per month is not the number of days the business is in operation,
it's the number of days the average employee is formally scheduled to work
during the month
A complication for your consideration. The calendar, both the working time
calendar and the conversion we have been discussing, are not the hours of
business. They control when tasks will be scheduled to take place. But a
"task" should represent the work of one individual, a "skill set package" if
you like, or a team of such individuals working together as a unit. If you
use the 24 hour calendar and 168 hour week and enter a task with a duration
of 1 week, that implies that for the entire week work never stops - the
resource never has a meal, never has a sleep period or a rest for the full 7
days. That just doen't happen. So what happens if you use the 24 hour
calendar as the project calendar, set hours per day as 24, and set up
resource calendars that define their actual work hours like 8-5 M-F? I put
in a task starting Monday with a duration of 1 day. It shows starting Mon
at 8am, ending Tue at 8am. I assign Joe Labour to do it. The task
reschedules to start Mon 8am and end Wed at 5pm. But the duration still
reads "1 day." That's a big jump between what 2 tasks with the same
duration, one with resources assigned and the other without resources, will
show for their elapsed times and that can lead to a very confusing schedule.
Hope this gives you a few things to check out - let us know how it goes...
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
