Someone asked me these days how he can plan the critical cut over phase of his project when he has to go down to an hourly granularity and specify tasks which need to start on a specific hour of the day and which might take only a few hours, while the rest of the project is planned on a daily base as usual. His question was: can this be done with one plan in MS Project or should he better use two plans – an extra one for the cut over period ?
My recommendation was to not start with two plans. Maintaining two plans for one project could easily become a nightmare, at least would be hard to handle, even MS Project does allow to combine multiple plans or to have one resource pool for mutiple plans.
There is no need to deal with that complexity since MS Project
- has all the flexibility you need to adjust the timescale of your gantt chart
- and allows to specify timestamps for e.g. a task’s start date also including hours and even minutes.
To view that part of the gantt chart showing the cut over period with hourly granularity it is possible to simply “zoom in” until hours start appearing in the timescale, or to adjust the timescale by doing a right-click on it, then select “Timescale…” to open up the timescale dialog. This would allow e.g. to set up a third tier on the timescale and to show hours there.
In order to be able to specify task related timestamps including hour and minute a default option of MS Project has to be changed, since by default those timestamps are only treated as a simple date. This can be achieved by going to the Tools -> Options menu item and selecting the “View” tab in the appearing Options dialog. Open up the “Date format” drop down and select the appropriate format containing also hours and minutes. This now will allow to specify hour and minutes for each timestamp field in MS Project.
Note that when you click on the arrow besides such a field still the date picker calendar comes up allowing you to select a date only. Per default the time will be set to the default start time of a day, as can be seen and changed under the “Calendar” tab of the Options dialog. After having selected a date however it is possible to edit that field and type in a new time.
August 29, 2007 at 11:21 am
Simple and exact answer for me (the MS proj beginner). Thanks a lot.
t
August 29, 2007 at 11:30 am
…and: What it one want to start a set of activities next day although there remains a free time in the current day. Is there a fomula like “leave the rest of the day free and start next successor activities next day in the morning” ? I don’t want to fix it by timestamps but simply tell this is the last activity of the day and the next is the first of next day.
Thanks tb
August 29, 2007 at 11:34 am
the previous request might also be solved if there is an option which says that an activity cannot span a day. It should start and end at the same day (supposing the callendar allows this – eg the duration is less than 8hrs for instance), thanks
tb
August 29, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Hi Tomas. Thanks for stopping by. Unfortunately I am not sure whether I got your question right or whether the option you mention really exists. The only possible answer coming to my mind is that in MS Project Options under “Calendar” you can specify the default time when a task starts or ends. It is recommended that this is identical with the settings of you working calendar.
August 29, 2007 at 12:15 pm
To put it in another way: new tasks will always start on that time as specified under Options -> Schedule for a particular day by default. In order to change the time you would have to follow the steps I have described above. The other option you have of course is to simply dragt tasks around on your gantt chart pane.
August 29, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Thanks and apologize for my bad expression. Yes, the question was unclear.
Here is the better example: Let’s asuume tha the project consists of 2 taks (7Hr and 8Hr) and that according to the Project (or Resources) Working times the day starts at 8AM and ends at 16PM.
If one enters a task with the duration of 7hours, it would span from 8AM to 15PM. Ie 1 Hrs remains at the particular day. If the second task of 8 hours is entered, it would span from 15PM to 15PM the next day. So it is splitted between 2 days.
If the nature of the task requires as few breaks as possible, it vould be better to start the second task the next day (for example a person doesn’t want to book a hotel).
Certainly we can add a time constraint (drag the task). But constraints seems to me too rigid for complex projects. We can also add a lag time. This would flow but is constant, not elastic. I’d rather specify: “this task should start in the morning”, or “this task should span as few days as possible”. Something like word processors does if one specifies that the paragraph should not split accross multiple pages or should be placed at the begining of the page.
I understand that it could be somehow against the project management principles, but it could be nice in detailed level shedules.
Thanks Amagard! It would be fine to get know, but please don’t bother with the question too much. The life not the MSProj it is better traveling …
t
August 29, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Hi Tomas, now I understand what you mean. As far as I know the option you are looking for does not exist in MS Project. Initially if you enter your tasks they might start always on 8:00am next day but when for instance you do some resource leveling MS Project would fill the gaps and start the second task on 3:00pm on the first day in the example you mentioned.
I’d agree that setting constraints is not a good option either to accomplish this. I also try to avoid those where I can.
August 30, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Thank you Axel.
So I’ve to get relax and leave the MSProj do its work. No prob. Thanks and ejoy the secondlife :- )
t
August 13, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Hello
I am currently working with microsoft project and I am wondering if there is way to set a constraint in hours, so that my resources have to work at least 4 hours every day they are scheduled. When I level my resources I keep getting some of my resources working only 3.2 hours per day and I havent found a way to fix this issue unless I do it manually which couses scheduling problems. Please let me know if you could help me on any way.
Thank You.
September 9, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Hi John.
I don’t know of any function in MS Project to model a “minimum number of working hours” type of requirement for a resource.
There can be several reasons why your resources are working less time on a task than you would expect: for instance you have specified less working hours in their individual calendars or you have multiple resources assigned to a task and there is no more work to be done for a particular resource.
Hope this helps for now … if you have more info or questions please don’t hesitate to ask again.
September 18, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Hello,
Do you ynow if it’s possible to thell MS project that a task cannot be “interrupted”? Here’s the story behind the question:
Certain tasks in my project can only be executed during specific “maintenance windows” (say, between 1am and 4am), and I would like MS project to schedule them “as soon as possible”. Thus, I don’t want to impose additional time constrains to this tasks (like “must start on”).
In order to do this, I’ve created a task calendar where the only working hours are those of the maintenance windows. This approach works fine, except for this: If I define fixed duration tasks A and B of 2h each, MS project schedules A from 1am to 3am on day 1 and B from 3am on day 1 to 2am on day 2. However, my maintenance tasks must start and end within the same window on the same day.
Any clues?… Ideas?… Black Magic?
Thank you very much in advance
Luca
September 22, 2008 at 3:43 am
Hi John,
I was wondering if there is a way so I can have a task split over a certain amount of days but only go for a couple of hours. What I mean is I might have a task that will take 2 hours to do but I have between the 25/09/08 and the 10/10/08 to do it. How can I represent this in MS Project.
Any help would be great, thanks.
September 22, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Hi Luca, I tried out your example without assigning any resources to the tasks and in my case MS Project schedules both tasks into the same time slot as it should be. One reason it doesn’t happen in your case could be that you have one and the same resource assigned to both tasks which would cause those to be over-allocated when scheduling both tasks in the same time slot ?
Pmclay, what you try to do can be done with a task of type “fixed durration, not effort driven”. If you define it initially duration will be determined based on work you have specified, non-working days in your calendar and 100% resource utilization. When you later on reduce work assigned to the task resource utilization will be decreased correspondingly and duration of the task will remain unchanged, thus less work is performed per day, as you can see in the resource usage view. So, in your case:
1. Define a task with duration from 9/25 to 10/10 (12 working days according to default calendar in MS Project)
2. Assign a resource
3. Change task type to “Fixed duration, not effort driven” ( under tab “Advanced” in task property dialog )
4. Reduce Work for that task from 96 hours to 24 hours. Resource utilization will go down to 25 % and in the resource usage view you can see that only 2 hours are worked on that task per day in the time period you initially defined.
January 24, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Vielen Dank für die Information. Es half mir wirklich, meine Anweisung für meine Universitätsklasse zu beenden.
April 22, 2009 at 6:49 am
I can tell that this is not the first time at all that you write about this topic. Why have you decided to write about it again?
April 24, 2009 at 11:25 am
Ted, I am not sure what you are referring to. Where do you think I already wrote about this ?
April 27, 2009 at 8:21 pm
hi, I too have a scheduling problem that maybe you can help with.
I have a task, which will take 5 hrs. I want to schedule it to occur from 9-10 a.m. everyday, for 5 days from 9-10 a.m.
If I put in a resource unit of 12%, for 1 hour per 8 working hours, it schedules 7minutes per hour. How can it be done as I described above? thanks.
April 27, 2009 at 8:51 pm
p.s. I can do it with recurring, but that seems awkward.
April 28, 2009 at 11:41 am
dave,
two ways I can think of to accomplish this. For both ways you would model your task as one task with fixed work.
Option 1: Kepp your resource assigned 100 % to that task but give him a working schedule from 09:00 to 10:00 am only. This option only works if you do not need to assign him to other tasks during these same days. As an example see here.
Option 2: Manual edit planned work in Resource Usage view. See example here. When doing this a little icon on the left of the Resource Usage View indicates that resource usage has been edited manually. I still have to figure out myself how MS Project then computed a resource utilization of 33 % !?