Project Timeframes

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    • #414921
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      When grouping tasks under a summary, I want to fix a time frame of the summary to be one week (no resources assigned at this level) but several tasks under that summary take less than a week to complete, some just a few hours for each resource.

      If i fix the summary duration to be 37.5 hours for one week and pick some days when certain tasks are occurring within the week, will the overall time calculated for the resources only be reflecting how much time the resources are working instead of:
      a) the summary time of 37.5 hours per week plus
      b) time the resources spend working on the tasks with

      I use Project 2013.

    • #414924
      Larry Christofaro
      Participant

      Mae, good question. You can fix the summary task to any specific duration by making it a manually scheduled task. Will that work for you in this case?

    • #414927
      Daryl Deffler
      Participant

      Mae;
      Task and project work hours always reflect the number of work hours assigned to the resource, regardless of the duration provided to complete those hours. For example, if Bob is assigned to Task 1 with 40 work hours, it doesn’t matter if those hours are completed in 1 week or 3. The total work hours for Bob is 40.

      One caution on using summary tasks. Microsoft does not recommend assigning resources or dependencies to summary tasks.

      The problem with assigning resources is related to actual hours. The summary task %complete is driven by the child tasks which could result in phantom actual hours being applied to the resources assigned to the summary task. For example, Bob is assigned to the summary task with 40 hours but has not yet done any of that work. If the total % complete of the child tasks is 50%, the summary task will show 50% and MS Project will therefore assume Bob has completed 50% of his work and Project will “give” him 20 hours of actual work. Its also a problem if you use Server and timesheets since summary tasks will not appear on timesheets for actual hours entry.

      The problem with dependencies is that these summary task relationships create debugging issues which will often result in ineffective resource usage, typically gaps with no assigned work.

      I mention these issues assuming that your schedule will now be containing dependency relationships attached to these summary tasks and I can see downstream issues arising.

      I would recommend NOT using summary tasks to drive duration or task relationships. Use them how they work best; to summarize the child tasks within them. I would instead recommend fixing the duration of each small task to one week. With this approach, each task would be configured as Fixed Duration of 1 week with assigned resource hours of only 1 or 2. This indicates those hours can be done anytime over the course of the duration. This will help you establish much cleaner dependency relationships driven by the individual tasks.

      Hope that helps

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