Changing relationship between Work, Units, and Duration? 2

[sanjay102]

I have just begun entering resource information into a fairly simple project. However, I cannot understand how MP handles the relationship between Work, Units, and Duration. For example, for a 1-week task, MP seems to be using 20 hours as the available time. So, if a person is assigned 24 hours, it calculates 120% as his Units and marks it overallocated. It is doing the same thing for all 3 people assigned to the task (e.g., 4 hrs comes up as 20%).

In another example, for a 2-week task duration (i.e. task due in 2 weeks and is resource-driven), there are 2 people each assigned 32 hrs. Yet, MP says that the Units for one are 100% and the other 50%. I cannot find a reason for this. I have checked and rechecked the calendar settings.

Can someone help? I may be missing something somewhere as I am a new user. Thanks.

 

[PDQBach]

This is the _hardest_ part of Project for people to understand.

1. There are three task Types: Fixed Units, Fixed Work and Fixed Duration. You can display this item by inserting the column "Type" in the grid to the left of the Gantt chart.

2. There is also an "Effort Driven" column (Yes or No) that comes into play when changing Fixed Duration and Fixed Units tasks. For now, leave it as Yes. You can display this item by inserting the column "Effort Driven" in the grid.


3. Fixed Duration:
3a. Duration does not change when you change Units or Work.
3b. Changing the amount of Work will cause changes to the Units assigned
3c. Changing the Units assigned will cause changes to the amount of Work.

4. Fixed Work tasks and Fixed Units tasks behave in an analogous manner.

5. There is a special case when you are first creating a task and attempting to assign a resource to it immediately before moving to another task. I never encouter this because I ...

5a. Create all my tasks
5b. Create all my task predecessor links.
5c. Create all my resources (or link to a resource pool).
5d. Double-click on each task in turn, go to the resources tab and assign resources as appropriate.