Various resource assignments for different portions of a task

Question

Consider two tasks (Task 1 and Task 2), as well as two resources (Developer 1 and Developer 2). Task 1 and 2 respectively require 1 and 2 days from start to finish.

I want to make the following resource assignment in Microsoft Project:

• Developer 1 allocates 50% of his time working on Task 1.
• In parallel, and using any remaining time, Developer 1 helps Developer 2 to work on Task 2.

In this way, once Developer 1 finished working on Task 1, he should allocate 100% of his time to work on Task 2. That is, Task 2 requires (1.5 + 2) * 8 = 28 man-hours.

Here's a screenshot of what I achieved in MS Project:

My question is: How to allocate 50% of Developer 1 for the first day of Task 2, and 100% of him for the second day of Task 2.

Answer 1

You can adjust the hours of work for each resource by day in the Task Usage view:

Gantt Chart then looks like this:

Answer 2

Not 100% sure this would work, but if what you want is for Dev1 and Dev2 to work in parallel on tasks 1 and 2 until task 1 is done (so 4 hours) and then swarm until the remainder (20 hours, half of which is 10 hours) of task 2 is done, couldn't you just set Dev1 to 28.57% (4/14) task 1 and 71.43% (10/14) task 2?

Answer 3

Ideally, I do prefer to understand the underlying reason before providing a solution. Can you explain why you need to allocate Dev1 depending on the day?

As a quick workaround, you can split Task 2 into two parts, assign 50% of Dev1 to first part, and 100% to second part together with Dev2 for both.