Project Professional 2007 task duration

[Arun]

Hi,
We are using MS project 2007, when ever we add a new task to that plan by
default the duration is comming as 1day? and the start and end date is
comming as 27-03-2008 and 28-03-2008 actually it should come as 27-03-2008
and 27-03-2008. This is happening whenever I add a new task. How cn I change
this?


Thanks in Advance,
Arun

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Arun,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

This sounds like a mis-match between definitions of time in the calendar and
in your default. For example, if you have changed the working hours so that
a day is 8.5 hours, when you enter a task it defaults to the 8 hour calendar
day and thus extra half hour is done the next day. Try
Tools/Options.../View tab and select a date format to show the time of the
day - this will help you to see what's going on. You might like to see FAQ
Item: 5. Default Working Hours

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[Steve House]

For some reason your new tasks are starting somewhere after the start of the
workday OR your Project calendar is showing working times on a given day of
X hours while the definition of "Day" on the Tools/Options/Calendar page is

X. Lets say your working time calendar shows hours of work being 8am to

12noon and 1pm to 4pm (a 7 hour workday) but the Options setting for "Hours
per Day" remains at the default value of 8. A task with a duration of 1 day
will translate to a duration of 8 hours (actually 480.0 minutes, durations
are ALWAYS stored and computed in minutes to the nearest 10th). It starts
Mon 27 Mar at 8am but the calendar shows the resources will go home at 4
after putting in 7 hours of time, leaving 1 hour still to be done on the
morning of the 28th before "1 days" worth of work has been completed. Or
perhaps the Project Start time is something other than the start of the
workday, causing task starts to be similarly offset. If you have "Autolink
Inserted or Moved Tasks" turned on (and you absolutely SHOULD NOT) and are
adding the new task after another task that ends at something other than the
exact end of the workday, the resulting link will force the new task to
begin at the moment the previous task ends so only part of a day's work gets
done on the day it starts, leaving the residual to be done the next day.

In the Options menu, View tab, select a date format that includes the time
of day to help you figure out exactly what is going on. Check the setting
of your Project Start Date, Project Calendar, and the Tools/Options/Calendar
menu entries. The "Default Start" and "Default Finish" entries should
correspond to the start and end times of your workday, the "Hours per Day"
and "Hours per Week" settings should match the working hours in a day and
week as defined in your Project Calendar. The Project Start time should
correspond to the start of your workday unless you want all of the tasks to
be offset to start later in the day for some reason.

HTH

 

[Arun]

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. Let me explain with more details. In our comany we
are working 9.5 hours per days. i.e I set in the "change working time"
Fridaty and Saturday Holiday and Sunday to Thursday 7:30 AM to 1:00 PM &
2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. In the "Options" menu and schedule tab I set working
hours per day 9.5 hrs and hours per week 47.5 hrs and working days per month
22 days....

Thanks,
Arun

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

In tools, Options, Calendar, also set the default start right i.e; 7:30
And whenever you have questions of this type, in tools, options, view, set
the date format to the upmost of the list to show time of day: that will
clarify things a lot.
--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
+32 495 300 620
For availability check:
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/Calendar.pdf

 

[Steve House]

In addition to what Jan wrote, also double check to make sure the Project
Start Date in the Project/Project Information dialog is set to 07:30. IF
you make your changes to the calendar, etc, AFTER starting this project
file, the Project Start will most likely reflect the orginal default start
time of 08:00, not 07:30, causing the starts of all your subsequent tasks to
be offset into the workday by half an hour. What leaving it at 08:00 would
mean is that even though the workday starts at 07:30, for some reason the
first task won't start until 08:00, meaning (if it's a 1 day task) that it
won't finish the next day until 08:00. That's not what I think you're
saying you want to happen - you want that first task to finish that evening
at 18:00. For that to happen, it has to start at 07:30.

 

[katavdan]

Hi,

I'm a project manager using the MS Project 2007.
We are starting to integrate the software across our organization (we
previously used 2007).

I have a similar problem involving task duration. We are set to the
default of 8 hours per day, 08:00-12:00 and 13:00-17:00, and that is ok.
We don't have 1/2-day or part-day tasks. all tasks are full work days.
So, the problem start when, for example, there is only 1/2 working day
on a holiday. All the subsequent tasks are pushed by 1/2 day and always
start at mid-day. We want to over-ride that. We want to force ALL tasks
to always start at 08:00, and we will just make an exception on those
holidays (of 1/2 day) to either extend the task to be 1.5 or 0 days. We
never want to encounter a situation where a task starts mid-day, since
it causes so many problems down the road, it took us a long time to find
that this was the reason (following your great tip of adding the time of
day in the view definition).

Is there any way we can solve this?

Thanks for all the help,
Dana

 

[Rod Gill]

You can't force all tasks to only start at 8:00 without entering a date and
time in the start date. This however will cause you far more grief and
wasted time. Your best bet is to start the first task on 8:00 then only use
1d durations. A half day holiday should maybe made a full day and you can
use the extra half working day for catch up or preparation for other tasks
or training etc.

--

Rod Gill
Microsoft MVP for Project

Author of the only book on Project VBA, see:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[Steve House]

If you a: only schedule in whole day increments; b: always start tasks at
the start of a workday; yet c: have half-day holidays in the calendar, what
happens to a task that starts on the holiday? A 1 day task takes 8 hours of
duration using the defaults. Duration is defined as the number of units
defined as working time by the calendar, between when a task starts and when
it finishes. If Friday is a 1/2-day holiday, a 1-day, ie 8-hour, task that
starts Friday morning still has 4 hours of duration to run when everyone
goes home at noon. It will resume Monday at 8am and finish Monday at 12
noon. But contrary to what you are looking for in your post, this is NOT a
1.5 day duration task. It is still only 1 day. Friday afternoon doesn't
count against duration because it is defined as non-working time in the
controlling calendar. Friday 8am to Monday 12 noon is a ONE day task, not a
1.5 day task, if Friday afternoon plus Sat and Sun are shown as time off.

Bear in mind that Project always schedules in minutes to the nearest 10th.
It allows entry in units of days, weeks, etc for convenience sake but it
always converts them to minutes internally. If the default settings are
used, "1 day" duration is not a day of the week or even a shift. Rather, it
is one or more time intervals that total 480.0 minutes. Duration time
starts to run at whatever time the task happens to start. It pauses
whenever the calendar says the time is now non-working time and resumes when
the calendar says working time starts again. The task ends whenever 480.0
of the minutes that are listed as working time in the calendar controlling
the task have been used up.

If a task starts on holiday Friday at 8am and is 1 day duration, are you
saying you want its successor to wait until Tuesday 8am to start instead of
starting Monday at 1pm as soon as the predecessor task has finished? Why
waste Monday afternoon? Or are you saying you want its successor to start
Monday at 8am even though Friday's task isn't actually finished yet? Note -
if that's actually physically possible, perhaps they shouldn't be linked at
all - a link implies there is a mandatory physical relationship between what
is happening in the predecessor task and the activity of the successor being
able to proceed - the predecessor produces the parts required in the
successor, for example.

 

[imranwahabit]

hello my name is mohammed i am new to msproject,in my application i hav
to get the project duration(i.e in how many day it will be finished)jus
by providing the workign hours and starting date,and my weeks start
from saturday to wednesday,daily 6 hours/day,
so can anyone of u help me n let me know how to do i

 

[JulieS]

Hello imranwahabit,

As you are new to Project, I suggest following step by step through
Mike Glen's excellent series of free tutorials at
http://project.mvps.org/mike's_tutorials.htm

You'll need to follow at least through Lesson 7 to be able to see
the concepts of:
Working hour changes (6 days per week)
Entering tasks
Creating resources
Entering task relationships (predecessor/successors)
Entering work

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional
information about Microsoft Project