Task Usage / Resource Usage Zero Hours

[screechez]

Hello,

I am trying to use Task Usage and Resource Usage views to schedule individual resource assignments during the duration of the task. A task can have a total duration for many weeks, but resources (people) are typically used on-and-off during that task. To schedule this, I use task usage to assign specific hours to people on specific days of the task duration.

The problem is that the work hours between each resource "shift", the task usage and resource usage view adds 0h (zero hours). I would prefer to see a blank entry rather than the 0h as it would make it easy to see when resources are not assigned to do anything. Right now, the work details on my resource usage is filled up with a lot of 0h's. Is there anyway to get rid of the zero hours and have them displayed as blanks?

Thank you for your help,

 

[PDQBach]

You must have a lot of free time on your hands and must really like micro-managing staff.

If the display bothers you then copy and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet and change all "0 h" to "".

 

[screechez]

I appreciate your helpful comment about micro-managing but a simple answer would have been sufficient without the side comments. You should keep that in mind when providing "help" on this forum because people are looking for answers for their questions; they don't care about your personal comments or opinions. This is for proper budgeting project costs and making sure people are not working more than what should be acceptable.

 

[PDQBach]

Tough love.

The time you waste managing hour-by-hour what your resources are doing is effort spent with minimal return. If you're worried about overallocation then View > Resource Usage; set Timescale to Years and Months; rightmousebutton on the right hand grid and select Overallocation. If you're overallocated by more than a week then look more deeply. Anything less than that and you are a prisoner of the (often deeply flawed) estimates you were working from.

Once a week, go to your resources working on Critical Path tasks and ask them ... *NOT* what they have done (nobody cares about that) ... ask them how much more work they have to do, is there a revision in the Finish date, what's blocking them on specific tasks.

You're focused on the minutia; you're treating all deliverables and all deliverable schedules as equal. Oh, I haven't forgotten, you're also focused on "0 d" in the display.