Task Types and Resource Assignment ??

[ITByte]

Ok,,,, I'm green, and just can't get something to click. We need to be able
to assign resources to tasks among many projects, and allow the user to work
on the task within a given time frame. Example: There is a month to do the
task Start-Finish, but I only need 14hrs of time from the resource. The
resource can work on the task 1hr a day for 14 days, 7hrs for 2 days, and it
doesn't matter as long as the due date is meet. I'v play with slack time to
accomplish the padding, but I can't seem to get it to work. It seems that
Project assumes the task will be worked on start to finish based on the
duration.

Thanks
Greg

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Greg:

Open your project and select a task, then select Window > Split. This is
called the task entry view. It is the only view in Project that allows you
to control every aspect of scheduling tasks. If you've never used it before,
you should also consider a really good course on using the Project client.

Notice in the bottom half of the screen that you can enter all the
parameters for the selected task. First, set the task duration. Set the task
to fixed duration. Select your resource from the drop down menu, and enter
the work value. When you click OK, the system will calculate the units for
you. At this point you may or may not want to set the task type back to
fixed units depending on how you want the system to treat the task when
accepting actual work and rescheduling remaining work.

 

[Andy]

Gary,

Along this line of questioning, is there a way to track a user's time
against a task's fixed duration over an amount of time greater than the task
duration? Example: An engineer works on a network design over a 5 day
period. Only 8 hours were alloted to complete this network design, but the
engineer is working on several projects simultaneously and isn't able to
complete the design in 8 hours straight...instead the engineer spends 8 hours
completing the design over a 5 day period. I'm a PM for a consulting firm
and it's very important that I'm able to track an engineer's time on a task
against the amount of time we quoted for the engineer to perform that task
and was wondering if this is possible in Project Server 2003. I am currently
testing with Project Server before deployment, but haven't been able to
figure out how an engineer can log actual time for a task over a start/finish
time period greater than the duration.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Andy

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Andy:

Fixed duration tasks cause the system to spread actual work across the
duration when they hit Project. The web tables represent the data as
entered. If it is important to you that the actual work record is updated in
the Project exactly the way it's entered in PWA, then don't use
Fixed-Duration tasks, used fixed units. The spreading of actual work
shouldn't alter the total values, although sometimes we see strange rounding
errors. As long as you're correctly collecting the actual work, you should
be able to retrieve it from the system. Make sure you set a baseline for
comparison purposes!