Task completes within a single day

A

AndrewO

Hello,

Here is my situation: I am using Project Pro 2007. I am working on a
project for an IT company which allows various amounts of downtime on
Saturdays. Some Saturdays they allow 6 hours, some Saturdays 10, some
Saturdays none. I have created a calendar with the only working days
as Saturdays with a 10 hour work day, and then created exceptions for
each 6 hour Saturday, and marked the prohibited Saturdays as non-
working time.

I then created a resource, meant to be used as a generic resource,
whose base calendar is this special "downtime windows" calendar.

This almost works perfectly... If I have a task that is expected to
take a full 6 hour downtime window, I assign it to the "downtime
worker" resource, and give it a 6h duration and project neatly moves
the task to the next available 6 hour Saturday.

The problem is that if I have a job which is expected to take between
6 and 10 hours, Project will automatically schedule the first 6 hours
in the next available 6 hour window, then the remaining hours in the
next window. But we can't leave things broken during the week,
obviously. So if the schedule goes 6-6-10, I expect a 9 hour task to
be done on the third Saturday, but instead Project puts 6 hours in the
first one and the 3 hours remaining go in the next 6 hour Saturday.

I suppose I could make another calendar, so there would be one for the
6hr, and one for the 10h windows, and a resource that uses each and
then assign each task to the right resource, but that seems like more
pain than I should have to go through. I've played with the split
options, but those only seem to deal with splits induced by leveling.

Short version of the question: is there any way to ensure that a task
starts only when there is enough time left in the day to complete the
task the same day it starts?
 
J

JulieS

Hello Andrew,

I don't believe that is possible without some code. You'd have to
constantly test the work estimates for each task to determine
whether they fit the under 6 hour or over 6 hour window.

The best I can suggest would be to create the two task calendars --
the existing calendar which can be used for any task with a work
estimate of 6 hours or less and another task calendar with the only
allowed working time as the 10 hour Saturday shift. You can add the
"Task Calendar" field to a task view to make the assignment easier.

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


"AndrewO" wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top