setting capacity on resources...

[sensory007]

Hi,
I want to assign people resources to my tasks. We've worked out that, although we work 9 - 5.30, we are actually productive only 6 hours a day (the rest of the time is taken up with lunch, phone calls, meetings etc...). How best to set this up? In the projct setup, shall I say that each day is 6 hours long and set each person working at 100% capacity, or shall I set each day being 8.5 hours (9 - 5.30) and set the capacity at 80% (or whatever the correct persecntage is!)?
Thanks

 

[PDQBach]

I'll give you the easy way:

1. Never track anything by hours; track it by days.
2. Never mess with the hours per day or actual working hours.

1. That's because it's much easier to track a day's progress particularly when you have resources that have variable efficiencies during a given day.

2. That's because there is a lot of stuff "behind the scenes" that need to be set up correctly.

If you're really desperate, then use the standard times, track in days and set the individual resource "Max Units" to reflect something like 80% (your number) and you can see if resources are overallocated. But "overallocated" only means something if you can be absolutely certain that your estimates are absolutely correct.

Me? I've got projects with some resources allocated at a bunch of different "Max Units", different working day lengths and I would rather spend my time tracking what's happening than messing about in Project trying to finagle the minutia.