Forum Discussion
Help with Task Duration: Start Finish vs Actual Time worked.
Fairly New to MS Project. I am having a hard time understanding Start to Finish of a TASK vs Duration.
Example: Task was started on Oct 1st and finished on OCT 15th. The TIME it took the Resource person do actual do the task was about 2 hours of work...... BUT the task was not finished till 15 days after it started.
How do I set up this task to NOT measure the resources time spent as (360 Hrs), but still have it show on the GNATT that the task was started on OCT 1 and completed on OCT 15th.
FYI, I am trying to do this for ALL TASKS on my project.
Please Help.
- Linda --
Set the Task Type for every task to Fixed Duration, Non-Effort Driven. Enter a Duration for each task. When you are ready to assign resources, right-click anywhere in the white part of the Gantt Chart screen and select the Show Split item to display the Task Entry view (split screen view with the Gantt Chart in the top pane and Task Form in the bottom pane). Select a task in the Gantt Chart pane. In the bottom pane, select the resources you want to assign to the task and then enter the Work value for each resource. In the Task Form pane, click the OK button to make the task assignment.
Also, since you are new to Microsoft Project, I would encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube videos and begin watching them at:
https://www.youtube.com/@DaleHowardProjectMVP
Hope this helps. Welcome to the "wonderful world of Project". Let me start by explaining the difference between time span (duration) and effort (work). In Project duration is the time span in working days between the start of a task and the finish of a task. Work is the effort one or more resources expends to complete the task.
In your example it sounds like you want a fixed duration type task. It's not clear if the work estimated to do the task was 2 hours or if after all was said and done it only took 2 hours to do the task. Let's assume you estimated the task would take 5 hours for Joe to complete the task. There are various ways to set this up. Here is one way. Joe is initially assigned at 100% (full time) which gives a total work content of 88 hours.
But since the estimated work is 5 hours, edit the Work field to reflect that. Note that because it is set up as a fixed duration task, Joe's daily work changes to 0.45 hrs per day.
The task is complete and it only took 2 hours instead of the estimated 5 hours. So add a couple more columns to the view, Actual Work, Remaining Work and % Work Complete. So, we enter the actual work and since the task is complete we also enter the remaining work.
Scheduling with all tasks as fixed duration is unusual, normally the goal is to let the plan unfold dynamically. For example, finishing a task early saves schedule time or finishing late delays the plan.
Hopefully, this gives you some idea of how it all works.
John
