How to create a task to accumulate hours

[Bill Cole]

I want to create a task in my schedule to accumulate hours resources spend
on certain support tasks. These tasks in reality have no end date, they
just are used to keep track of the number of hours the resource spends on
those support tasks per week. The is similar to the administrative tasks
that can be set up to track vacation, sick, holiday time. But I want to
have this as part of my project.

Initially I set up a task that had work=0 and resources scheduled at
units=0%.
This worked in that it showed up on the resources timesheet in Project Web
Access.
Unfortunately when the resources entered their support hours the first week,
Project thought
the task was done because remaining hours=0 and so the task did not appear
on the resource's
task list in subsequent weeks.

I could put in a non-zero number of hours at the rate I expect the resources
to work on the support items,
for example a task with 200 hours with the resource plugged in at units=10%.
Project would then stretch
the task out for the duration of the project and allow the resource to enter
numbers and the task would not
show up as complete.

But I was wondering how others had handled the situation where they have a
perpetual task that they just
want to accumulate actual hours applied.

Thanks,

Bill

 

[Gary L. Chefetz \(MVP\)]

Bill:

You have to maintain a little remaining work to keep them in the current
tasks view, otherwise you need to teach users to switch to the all tasks
view to find them. There's no correct answer. You can used fixed duration
tasks to approximate the duration of the project and manage the durations as
time goes on. When you do this, it's good to set an actual start state to
anchor the task. In some situations, you can use a hammock technique to
control duration, but this is fairly tricky and doesn't work perfectly
either.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the books on Project Server"
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

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