How do I create a MS Project task with less actual work than its duration?

Question

In Jira projects we have a project task called "Project Admin Tasks". It has a start date from the date of the project inception right through to the end of the project i.e. when the project completes and is signed off.

The purpose of this task is so that the team can log ad hoc time for non-development tasks, e.g. meetings, telephone calls, project admin tasks.

So for a week long project we would allow 6 hours time for these types of tasks but the start and end dates would be say 17-Oct-2011 to 21-Oct-2011.

I'm trying to create a similar type of task in MS Project 2010, but despite my efforts I am can't seem to work out how best to implement this.

Is there a standard way to express this type of task in a project plan where the permitted allocation of time is less than the task duration?

Answer 1

Set the task to fixed duration, manually set the work to the desired hours, and the tool will calculate the appropriate resource allocation.

Or, you can manually allocate hours on each loaded resource under that package in the task usage view. Either works.

Answer 2

I prefer to create a main heading task with indented sub-task below it. Each sub task will have the individual time entries at 100% work completed. I use a date underscore initials method to identify who and when at a glance from the names. You could just enter the same task name over and over but filtering it later could become problematic.

Project Admin Tasks (as main)

15-Sep-12_APF (task name) 100% complete, X hrs, resources (indented)

15-Sep-12_BRT 100%, X Hours, resources (indented)

18-Sep-12_APF 100%, X Hours, resources (indented)

All the task will roll up into the main heading. If you have your baseline created at the project start you can also compare how many hours are going over, etc.

Answer 3

I know this is a late answer but I provide it for the archive.

As @David Espina says, if you want to create the non-productive time as a task you can either set the percentage for each resource assigned, or set the actual hours separate from the duration and let Project calculate the percentage for you.

If I were doing this my approach would be to change the working time calendar to reflect the actual hours available for the project. If your developers are available 34 hours per week, change the working time per day to 6.8 hours. This has the advantage that it automatically applies to any resource added to the plan, whereas if it is an explicit task you would have to add to the task effort and add that resource to the task. It also automatically scales the time to complete every task, and does not need to be updated if the project schedule is extended.

As a matter of fact, I am using this approach to plan a project during furloughs. I just removed Friday as a working day in the base calendar to plan with a four-day week.

As an aside, I note that accounting for (personal and holiday) time off, most employees already only work around 34 hours per week. Admin and non-project tasks further reduce this number. If you typically plan projects that only take a few months, employees can flex their time to be available during the project, however if you plan projects taking a year or more you need to account for the fact that people have to take their leave sometime.

Answer 4

Just use the Actual Work Column. If you have more than 1 resource assigned, it'll calculate a blended rate. So if each resource will work 40 hours, put 80 hours actual work. If 1 bills $100/hr, the other bills $50/hr = $75*80 as far as Actual Cost

Answer 5

Actually MSProject should have two fields - duration and effort. An effort takes 10 hrs but the duration is over 2 weeks. The person would work on this based on other factors up to 10 hrs over a period of 2 weeks.

So Effort = 10 hrs Duration = 2 weeks starting on Aug 7 through 18 for two weeks