Choosing Work Week for a Project

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    • #408585
      John Murphy
      Member

      Our UK team has let me know that they have a 37.5 work week. Currently the UK Calendar has the UK holidays but a 40 hour week.

      I have made the change in TEST. I have also changed the Working Schedule of the project template to match the UK 37.5 hours in the Calendar. So now if the UK plans a task for 5 days the hours assigned is 37.5 for the task. This is all fine and good for UKrs, but we also have India resources who work on UK projects and who have a 40 hour week.

      Should I have the UK projects be based on a UK calendar with 40 hours in a week instead of 37.5 hours in a week for task planning? And then based on who is assigned the task the duration will be revised based on that resources’s calendar and work week … 37.5 or 40.0.

      Thoughts?
      Thanks
      John

    • #408586
      Larry Christofaro
      Participant

      Hi John. This is not a subject that I’ve run across much so I don’t have a set answer for you. Even with a set answer, every situation is different and it sounds like you have a standard (37.5 hrs/wk) but with India exceptions. I found a forum answer that seems to have a good standard answer, but there might be other options. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/projectserver/en-US/65dbfda6-cd03-4186-97db-15a355c22866/resources-on-a-project-with-multiple-calendars-not-calculating-correctly?forum=projectserver2010general

      One question, are you managing resource demand? If you are then your options are limited. If not, then you might want to consider trying different task types that could allow you to easily assign India resources to UK projects at 37.5 hrs/wk.

      I know this question has come up before and there are articles and videos that cover this subject. I just hate to give you one answer when it might not be the best answer for your situation. Hope that helps…

    • #408587
      John Murphy
      Member

      Larry

      I appreciate your response. I will explore the forum answer.

      We are managing resource demand via Project Online …

      Thanks,
      John

    • #408613
      John Murphy
      Member

      Just to close this out …

      We decided to have the UK Projects mapped to the UK 37.5 Hours per Week calendar. So when a UK resource is assigned a 5 day task, the it is 37.5 hours of work. For tasks to be assigned to India resources, we set the duration to be in hours … 8 hours per day to match our India team’s calendar.

      Thanks
      John

    • #408615
      Daryl Deffler
      Participant

      One other thought that might be a simpler alternative than creating and maintaining a slew of custom calendars. We have a couple thousand resources in our organization that are scheduled to projects. About 10-15% of them have custom work schedules that equate to less than 40 hours per week with varying days on/off. Rather than trying to come up with lots of custom calendars, we decided to focus on the total work each resource can complete each week regardless of the days the work is actually performed. With this approach, we have ONE standard M-F 40 hour company calendar and we control how many productive hours we expect from each resource each week by setting their Max Units value. For examples:
      * An in-house full time resource (40 hours per week) is considered to be available 85% for project work(company standard), so those resources have a Max Units of 85%. 85% of their enterprise level 40 hours means we can count on 34 hours of project work per week from a full time resource.
      * For a 20 hour per week resource, the Max Units value is 42% (85% of 20 hours per week =17 hours / 40 =42%). Note that we don’t care what days the work gets done within the week. We just know we’ll get 17 hours from that person each week.
      * For a full time contractor resource the Max Units value is left at 100%. They aren’t give the 15% deduction for non-project meetings and such so they stay at 100%.

      This approach works quite nicely and it’s completely controlled through our AD Sync process driven by our HR system. The HR system tracks the resources relationship to a full time resource based on a factor of 1. 1 = full time 40 hours per week. .5 = 20 hour per week person and so on. By building this Max Units calculation into the AD Sync process any HR hours per week changes automatically adjust the resource’s Max Units accordingly.

    • #408620
      John Murphy
      Member

      Daryl,

      I will share this with my UK team. Keying on “the total work someone can do in a week no matter when” makes a lot of sense.

      Thanks for your answer. As always I really appreciate hearing your POV.

      John

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