Duration -vs- Work.. Doesn't seem to calculate correctly..

[Prodigus]

I'm working on aproject plan that will feed back into some capatilized hours so although I'm a techie I had to add 2 fields.

Since the techs will only be spending half (50%) of each day that they work on the project (as I indicated in resources) that doubles the "Duration". For example, for a task that I had initially set to last 1 day now says it will take 2 days. PERFECT!

The problem comes when I added a column for "Work". I added this so that I could show that although the Duration of the project (and all of it's individual tasks) would take 4 months, that this particular tech would only be spending half of the Duration indicate actually working on it.

It now shows what I expected it to show on the "tasks" which is to indicate that this task will take 1 days' worth of actual "work" EXCEPT for the roll-up which stills shows the same number of hours as the duration does.

I'm no master at Project so I'll go ahead and explain what I mean by roll-up. My team has to roll-out 30 new servers starting in February.

I started with a task at the top that says

2005 Server Roll-Out

Under that I have

Server1

which is indented so that it will roll-up if I wanted to only show the top line.

Under that I have all of the tasks that have to be completed to roll-out server1 which of course are indented so that if I wanted to just show the servers with their timelines instead of all of the tasks (you know, like if I was showing it to management).

Is it the way I'm doing it or what? I just don't see how Duration and work could come oput to the same number of hours when all of the sub-tasks undere work are half of what all the tasks are under duration...


Thanks,

-Prod

 

[PDQBach]

In brief:

On an individual task: Work does not equal duration (you already figured that out).

On a summary task: Work is sum total of all of the work in the subtasks beneath the summary task. Duration is the start date of the earliest starting subtask through the finish of the latest finishing subtask -- it is *not* the summation of the durations of the subtasks beneath the summary task.