Schedule entire project based on a 5 hr work day

Question

Using MSoft Project 2013. Wanting to schedule entire project based upon a 5 hr work day. I have performed the following steps to do this however it does not seem to be working: In MS Project; file\schedule\changed 'hours per day' to 5, changed hours per week to 25. When I then schedule a task for 8 hours, start and finish dates should be 2 day span however it only displays a 1 day span.

Answer 1

The hours per day setting is used to translate durations expressed in 'Days' into 'Number of Hours'.

What you need to do is alter the Working Time in the Calendar. You can either do this in the Project Calendar (i.e. the base calendar) so that every resource calendar that is derived from it inherits the same working day. Or you can do it on a resource-by-resource basis so that only individual resources inherit that working day.

How you achieve this depends on which version of MS-Project you are using since, until MS-P 2010 it was done one way (complicated and counter-intuitive) and since 2010 it was done a different way that is only marginally less complicated and a little bit more intuitive!

But whichever way you do it, do it right at the start, before adding tasks and resources. Applying it retrospectively will work, but it will really screw with your task durations and you will probably need to re-visit each task and reset their values. If you already have actuals that will only make it worse, sorry.

If you are using the older versions of MS-Project, I have provided some detailed instructions about how to set up working times for projects and resources in this article, including a step by step guide. But I have nothing for doing the equivalent in 2010 at the moment. If you are using the later versions, look at Change Working Time, and then edit the 'Default' row (which defines the default working times) to match your actual working times. It works in a similar way for individual resources as well, you just need to pick a specific resource's calendar by accessing it through the resource sheet...

Answer 2

An alternative to consider: if what you want to express is that even though your resources work 8 hours per day - they can only generate 5 hours of work per day on tasks in the project, consider lowering the resource's maximum units to 62.5%. (It will show as 63% in the Resource Sheet).

This allows you to still keep a "day" at 8 hours and a week at 40. No need to change the project calendar.

If you assign the resource to a "day" task - the amount of work calculated is 5 hours in the 8 hour task duration. If you enter 8 hours of work, the task duration is calculated to 1.6 days.

Answer 3

You should level your project hour by hour if you are working in hourly tasks. This will make the tasks follow each other without gaps.