How to Implement Asymetric Shift Schedules?

[Segrest]

Hello Everyone,

I need to set up a shift calendar in Project Server 2007 where the non-work
days vary in a four week cycle. For example...

XOOXXXXXOOXXXXOXXXXXOOXXXXXO (x=WORK, O=NON-WORK)

The schedule repeats every 28 days.

Any ideas?

Bob Segrest

 

[Ben Howard]

Hi Bob,
You should be able to edit the standard enterprise calendar. I don't think
there's a simple way to do what you want, but 15 minutes work should see it
set up for a few years in the future. Are you familiar with the process for
doing the above?

 

[Segrest]

Hi Ben,

Not really...

Creating a new calendar is straight forward. Creating a custom set of work
hours is also fairly straight forward. The part I can't seem to get my arms
around is the basic work week. Project seems to be based on a reoccuring one
week schedule, and what I need is to create a reoccuring 4 week schedule.

I tried creating a seven day work week schedule and then putting the days
off as reoccuring exceptions. But Project complains about an exception
conflict because "They both use the same type of exception, day count, and
their interval overlaps."

What am I missing?

Bob

 

[Ben Howard]

Hmm, I'm not sure what the error means or exactly where you are getting it,
but this is how I would do what you need to do.

Select all the days, click on work weeks, and click details

1. Highlight the standard calendar, and click edit.
2 . Select all the days, click on work weeks, and click details
3. Highlight the relevevant days (eg Sun - Sat).
4. Click Set days to these specific working times

Then, using the exceptions tab, create the exceptions. If they do reoccur
every 4 weeks, then you can set this in the details tab to re-occur every 4
weeks. You might need several exceptions that re-occur a different times to
match what you require.

Before changing the standard calendar, I'd set up another one just to test
if this was a live system.

Note any exisitng projects that use the standard calendar will change their
schedule based on the new calendar.

 

[Segrest]

Hi Ben,

Ok… Here is what I’m doing in a bit more detail…

Launch the Change Working Time dialog.

Use the Create New Calendar button to create a copy of the Standard calendar
called Day Shift.

Select the Work Weeks tab and click the Details button.

Select all days, select Set Days to these specific working times, enter the
correct work times for my shift, and click OK.

Select June 25, 2007 on the calendar.

Switch to the Exceptions tab, enter a label in the Name field and click the
Details button.

In the details dialog select Nonworking, Weekly and set the Recur every
counter to 4 weeks. Check the Monday and Tuesday boxes, then select End
After and specify 13 occurrences. Click the OK button to close the dialog
box.

At this point life is good! We have created the first two day break in our
28 day schedule and it reoccurs for the next year.

Now select July 2, 2007, enter a label in the name tab, open the Details
dialog and select exactly the same options. When you click the OK button you
will receive a Microsoft Office Project error dialog with the following
message:

The exception conflicts with #1 “xxxâ€.
They both use the same type of exception, Weekly, and their interval
overlaps. Either change the date range or change the type of exception.

The “xxx†displayed is the label I placed in the Name field of the first
exception.

I suspect this is a bug…

It would help me a great deal if you or someone could run through this same
process and verify the same result. Or, tell me what I’m missing.

The way it stands now, I can only get one exception to reoccur. This
implies that I would have to manually enter each day off as a separate
exception line. That works out to at least 104 manually entered exception
lines per year times at least 6 shift calendars. Ugly, ugly ugly…

Bob

 

[Ben Howard]

Hi Bob,
I get the same error. I don't think you are missing anything, it just looks
like it wasn't written to support what you need to do using the re-occuring
patterns for the same day.

I guess you are going down the ugly route!

 

[Segrest]

Thank you Ben,

Having my results independently verified helps a lot.

I intend to report this as a bug.

Bob

 

[Ben Howard]

Hi Bob,
You're welcome. I must admit it took a while to work out exactly what you
wanted to do and then re-create the error.