Using different work weeks in one schedule

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    • #411307
      Dave Howe
      Participant

      My organization is on Project Server 2013. In one of our enterprise projects, we need to add a contractor’s schedule as tasks within the enterprise project. We attempted to copy the contractor’s schedule at the project level and paste it into our enterprise project. The problem we are facing is that the contractor’s schedule defines its default work week as 10 hours/day, Mon-Thur. When we paste it into our enterprise project, the durations change. It appears as though the enterprise project is still calculating the duration based on an 8 hour work day (e.g. a task in the contractor’s schedule that is 1 day in duration turns into 1.25 days when copied and pasted into the enterprise project). We have tried 2 things that did not resolve the issue:
      1) we tried applying the contractor’s schedule at the task level to their tasks in the enterprise project.
      2) we attempted to define an alternate work week in our enterprise calendar and apply it to the duration of the contractor’s activities.

      Can anyone help me figure out how to add the contractor’s schedule using their calendar and work week for their tasks while still using our default calendar and work week for other tasks in the enterprise project?

    • #411309
      Daryl Deffler
      Participant

      Dave;
      Our organization has the same scenario and while I’m not on point for configuring the solution, I think its rather simple. First, setup a second enterprise level calendar that reflects the contractor 10 hour day work week. When completed, there should be at least two base calendars at the enterprise level. A standard one for M-F 8-5 and another for the contractors. By default, the base calendar is the Standard, or M-F 8-5 calendar. For those resources that are contractors, change their base calendar to the new 10 hour day calendar. This is done in the Resource Sheet view by changing the value in the “Base” field to point to the new calendar name.

    • #411312
      Dave Howe
      Participant

      Thanks, Daryl. Unfortunately, our schedules are not resource loaded.

    • #411314
      Thomas Boyle
      Guest

      Dave,
      After creating and applying the 4dx10h task calender to the pasted contractor activities, the schedule should calculate correctely. The only real “issue” you describe is the inevitable stakeholder confusion regarding the definition of a “day” of duration. The program stores all durations in minutes, and the factor for converting between minutes and days is an attribute of the project file, not the calendar. As a result, your enterprise project will always display the duration of a 40-hour task (4 days in contractor’s schedule) as 5 days, despite the fact that it starts on Monday and finishes on Thursday according to a 4dx10h calendar.

      To head off confusion, you might consider using a custom text field to report “Standard Duration,” computed according to a formula like this one: [Duration]/IIf([Task Calendar]=”4dx10h”,600,[Minutes Per Day]) & “days”

    • #411324
      Dave Howe
      Participant

      Thanks, Thomas. The way you describe it is what I would expect to happen. Once copied and pasted and applying the 4dX10h task calendar to the pasted task, I’d expect to see a duration of 5 days, starting on Monday and Finishing on Thursday. However, what happens is it finishes the following Monday.

      Original contractor schedule using 4dX10h calendar:
      40 hour task, duration = 4 days, starts Monday 12/4, finishes Thursday 12/7

      copied and pasted task to new schedule using standard calendar, but applied contractor calendar to pasted task:
      40 hour task, duration = 5 days, starts Monday 12/4, finishes Monday 12/11

      Any idea why that is happening?

    • #411329
      Thomas Boyle
      Guest

      Dave, this is pretty flaky behavior. As you describe it, the schedule is not fully re-calculating after assigning the 4dx10h calendar (and you’ve already ruled-out the possible influence of resource calendars). In MSP 2010, I have run into something similar when experimenting with copying/pasting between projects and subprojects with different calendars. Especially when multiple projects are open – with tasks copied and pasted among them – the displayed durations become unstable, changing back and forth between correct and incorrect values just in response to cursor movements. The appearance is that the schedule is not being properly re-calculated OR Project seems loses track of the actual source data for the table that is displayed. It has helped to close the schedule files that I don’t need anymore (i.e. the sources) then manually force re-calculation of the merged/combined (but unlinked) schedule – sometimes after a save/close/open cycle.

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