Task Duration

[JEAVES]

Hi,
Has anyone successfully managed to have Project 2003
automatically set the task durations to the nearest 15
minutes (0.25 decimal). This is to allow a 1:1 match with
external time accounting systems which only allows time
entry to the nearest 15 minutes and simplify billing.

James

 

[Rob Schneider]

Internally, Project keeps time down to the minute, as I recall. It's
only how it's displayed. You can change via Tools/Options, Schedule tab
to input duration in minutes. You can enter in any units, and use
decimals, e.g. 4.25 hours. Not sure how you are getting the data out,
but if you did it via an Excel spreadsheet, you can display any number
of decimal digits you want.

What have you tried that did not work?

 

[JEAVES]

Rob,

You are correct. Project tracks time to the minute and it
is certainly configurable (limited) via the Tools/Options
tab into hours etc. It becomes more of a problem during
levelling or resolving resource over allocations. A
problem that could be (easily?) resolved if during
levelling it was possible to force project, via a
preference setting, to adjust the duration to the nearest
15 minutes. The transport from Project into the external
accounting system is a manual process at present. The
significance is having project and the accounting systems
balance. Have tried the creation of durations in a
spreadsheet and copy/paste into project....but once
levelling etc is done I get the same result.
What I do is after I finalise a baselined project, then
manually adjust the duration allocation via the Task Usage
for each resource - okay for small projects but an
absolute nightmare for large projects. Even more so when
updating the plan with actuals.
The only other thought I have been "entertaining" is to
write a VB script to do this.....but I would prefer not.