Honor non-working schedule

Question

I have a project where I have tasks that are a fixed duration (example: 2 days), and I have specialized resources scheduled to work on these tasks along with "non-specialized" resources. These specialized resources have an additional "non-working" day over and above the "Standard" calendar (I've added that additional "non-working" day onto their resource "calendar"). Basically, these guys don't work weekends or Mondays.

The problem is that when I enter the tasks, their respective duration, and then assign resources, Project keeps scheduling the task for Mondays if I have a regular "non-specialized" resource assigned too.

What I need is for Project to avoid Mondays on ANY task where the "specialized" resources are scheduled - period. The duration needs to stay constant, the resources need to stay constant. I just need to schedule the task to avoid Mondays.

Answer 1

The problem is that MS-Project looks at the resources working on the task and schedules those that can work on the Monday to do their work on the task on their working days. Those that cannot work on the Monday will not be scheduled to work on that day.

There is no facility in MS-Project to automatically skip assigning project resources on a certain day if any task resource cannot work that day.

You will have to manually fix this, either by manually fixing the task start date, or by creating a third resource type (Non specialised resources that do not work on Mondays) which are only assigned to tasks that are also assigned a specialised resource- that way MS-Project will not have any resources to schedule that work Mondays and so will not schedule the task to start on that day.

Possibly a simpler way would be to set up a specific Task Calendar that excludes Monday from working time, then apply that Task Calendar to any task that utilises both types of resource- then it can never be scheduled for Monday. However you have to remember to do it, and then remember to remove it if the specialised resources are removed from the task. A little bit fiddly, but probably ok depending on how many such tasks you have.