How can I stop task durations from being automatically reset?

L

Lee

We have an application which automatically lays out plans in Project and
noticed that:

- duration length is calculated appropriately but…
- when the program tries to set task duration (tskThisTask.Duration =
lngCalculatedDuration) nothing happens in some cases.

I stopped the program at this point and tried to modify the task manually,
within Project’s GUI. I was able to decrease task’s duration, which was
initially 243.66 days. I can make it, say, 100 days. When I try to set
greater duration, e.g. 500 days, Project says OK but then it changes it back
to 243.66 days. Obviously, if I can’t make it bigger manually, my program
won’t be able to make it bigger too.

I know that duration, work and units of a task depend on each other, see
next table. Each of the task types affects scheduling when you edit one of
the three elements as follows.

Task type If you revise units... you revise duration... you
revise work...
Fixed-units task Duration is recalculated. Work is recalculated. Duration
is recalced.
Fixed-work task Duration is recalculated. Units are recalculated.Duration
is recalced.
Fixed-duration task Work is recalculated. Work is recalculated. Units are
recalced.

So I tried changing the task’s type. The first two types won’t let me set
greater duration. When I tried the fixed duration type and modified duration
it seemed to work, but…

1. All this is done with “automatic calculation†switched off. When project
calculation is changed to Automatic, the task is shown as split – only the
initial amount of time was shown as allocated (243.66 days), and there were
dots (….) in the chart till the end of the time that I wanted to allocate (in
this case, 500 days).

2. When I changed the type of the task back to “Fixed Workâ€, the duration
was recalculated back to 243.66 days.

It seems that only longer durations (than originally set) cause this
behavior. Short durations are OK. Is there a workaround for this behavior?
 
L

Lee

Me again, with additional clarification. This duration is calculated by
project after adding resource assignments for the task. If no resource
assignments are added, there is no problem with either duration or work.
 
J

Jack Dahlgren

This is a new behavior in Project 2007.
The fixed duration task will adjust to actual assignments.
The work-around might be to create a dummy assignment with a 0 cost resource
for the longer duration but I haven't tried this.
Let us know if it works out.

-Jack Dahlgren
http://zo-d.com/blog
 

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