How do I manage resources with non-standard hours in MS-project?

Question

These are my default calendar options:

• Default start time: 8am
• Default end time: 5pm
• Hours per day: 8
• Hours per week: 40

I have two resources. Resource 1 has the standard calendar (8 hours / day) as base calendar, and Resource 2 has Calendar 1 as base calendar.

Calendar 1 has 9 hours/day. Working times: Mon - Fri 8am - 12pm, 1pm-6pm

I created two tasks. Resource 1 is assigned to Task 1, and Resource 2 is assigned to Task 2. I then entered the start and finish times for both tasks (13/7/15 - 16/7/15 for both tasks).

When I went to the Resource Usage page, Resource 1 is working 8h for all the four days of the task. Resource 2 is working 9h for the first three days, and 8h for the last day.

• Why is Resource 2 only working 8 hours on the last day?
• Why is it not 9 hours for each day that he is working and what can I do so that he is automatically working 9 hours for every day?
• When I manually change the last day so that he is working 9 hours, why does it turn red?

This happens whenever I assign a resource that does not have the Standard Calendar as the base calendar. The last day will have a different number of hours. What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

I have tested this and seen the effect. It is most bizarre. If it calculated as expected you should see 5h on the last day, not 8h.

My guess is that MSP "guesses" that you are expecting 32h of work to be done, allocates the max time to R2 for the first three days, "knows" that it won't need a whole day on the last day, but doesn't know by how much, so sets it to the smaller of a) the available resource hours and b) the default project hours per day. If you tell MSP you want 4d (or 32h) in the task and then allocate the resource you will see 9h,9h,9h,5h for R2/T2.

Conversely, if you are expecting T2 to be 36 hours of work because you are assigning someone who can do 36 hours in 4 days, then define that task to be 36h up front. It will initially show as taking between 4 and 5 days to complete, but when you allocate R2 who can do nine hours per day you will see that it reduces the duration to four days and checking the Resource Usage for that task you will see 9h,9h,9h,9h

Answer 2

I'm guess as you manually entered the dates you are working with manually scheduled tasks?

The tasks start at 8:00 am and end at 5:00 pm.

In the case of manually scheduled tasks Project is paying attention to the working hours per day and calculating how many hours of work each resource can fit. So for Task 1 and the 8 hour per day resource, they are scheduled for a total of 32 hours (4*8) for the 4 days in duration.

For Task 2, the task still starts at 8:00 in the morning and on days 1 through 3 the resource works 9 hours per day (27 hours). On day 4 the task ends at 5:00 pm so there are only 8 hours that day for a total amount of work of 35 hours.

If you use Autoscheduled tasks, you will see 32 hours for Resource 1 spread between 8:00 am on July 13 and 5:00 pm on July 17. For Resource 2, the same 32 hours of work is calculated by Project - but because that resource works 9 hours per day - the task ends at 2:00 pm on July 17.

No need to create a new Calendar (Calendar 1) - just change the resource's calendar for Resource 2.

As Marv notes, enter the work estimate and let project schedule the task based upon the work and the resource's calendar.

Manually scheduled tasks work somewhat like Fixed Duration. If I have a manually scheduled task starting July 13 at 8:00 am and Finishing on July 17 at 5:00 pm with a 9 hour per day resource assigned (total of 35 hours of work). On day 1 I record 10 hours of actual work - the remaining work is still 24 hours but the task still ends at 5:00 pm on July 17.

Answer 3

I know this is old, but try entering the finish date with the date AND time, like this: 4/13/16 6pm