URGENT! - Setting Overnight Working Hours

[Hile]

MSP 2002 SP-1: I'm managing a project in US EST time zone with resources in
India, one of which works 9pm EST the day before thru 6am EST. I'm trying to
adjust the resource's calendar to reflect his working hours and the app is
not letting me. I keep getting a pop up stating "end time cannot start before
start time" because I'm doing 9:30pm-2:am and 2:30am-6:00am. Do I have to
enter it as 12am-6am and 9:30pm-12pm? Will that accurately reflect his work
schedule?

I switched his calendar to base it on a 24-hr calendar and it still doesn't
let me put "overnight" working hours. How do I do this? I have to report the
timeline today and I just can't figure it out. We're on a very tight schedule
for this project. And they just changed their shift starting tomorrow so I
have to make this change reflect so we know what our timeline looks like
going forward. PLEASE HELP!

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Hile,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Project's calendar works from midnight to midnight. You are correct, but if
you want the hals hour break, you need to set up 00:00 to 02:00, 02:30 to
06:00 and 21:30 to 00:00.

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

 

[Hile]

Thank you so much. This worked great. I guess I was trying to do it in 2
sections rather than treating the break separately AND I'm ashamed to say I
totally spaced out and was using 12 for both noon and midnight instead of 00.

Thanks again. You've saved the day. After I read your response, it makes
perfect sense to me.

One thing that I know have that I don't understand is, in the resource list,
all the resources I changed the hours of to other than standard time state
"This resource should be leveled based on a Day by Day basis". Do you know
what this means?

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome, Hile

Have you tried resource levelling? This function in Tools/Resource
levelling... will delay tasks where resources are overallocated until the
resource becomes available. If you've already levelled, when you change the
calendar Project is suggesting you re-level. On the levelling dialog, there
is the optoin to change the granularity of the levelling algotithm, and the
message is recommending you try day by day. You might like to see article
29 in my tutorials.

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

 

[Hile]

I've never done leveling. I am a very light project user. I'll read your
article and see what I need to do.

Does this mean that right now tasks have been delayed further until such
time as the resource is available to complete it? If that's the case I'm not
worried. After editing the resource calendars from the 8-5 EST time they
originally had, the project is coming in sooner than before which is good. If
I level will that push the expected completion date out further? That would
be bad

 

[Mike Glen]

Well... Hile, levelling addresses situations where you have one resource
trying to do more than one task at the same time - they're overallocated.
Levelling will almost certainly push out the end date, but that's Project
telling you what's possible. You will then need to examine your project to
see where you can save time - re-assign resources, shorten Durations,
re-assess the scope of the project, or tell the owner that the end date is
now something else. That is what Project is for and it's doing it's correct
job in telling you what is possible. There's more on this in my later
articles.


Mike Glen
Project MVP