Scheduling day/night resources during shutdown.

[James Leonard]

I have a MS Project task to which I want to assign both dayshift and nightshift resources.

The project has a 24hr calender, the dayshift resource have a 6a-6p calendar, and nights use a 6p-6a calendar.  The resources are not equally staffed as there are 6 workers on days and 2 workers on nights.  I am using fixed work, auto-scheduled tasks.

This issue is when I assign resources, project equally devides the work between resources even though they are unequally staffed.  i.e. a 100mn-hrs (work) task is divided such that the day crew and the night crew must each accomplish 50mn-hrs.The Resource Usage page shows the 6-man day crew finishing 50hours of work on the first shift and never coming back.  The 2 night shift guys then spend the next 2-1/2 shifts doing their 50hours.  The task gets done faster if I only use the dayshift crew - which isn't correct.

Like any project manager, I want the task to be completed as soon as possible.  How do I set up this task correctly to have Project utilize the shifts to their maximum capacity?

[#2]

Not sure how you have the resource assigned. Do you have  the max units set correctly for each group of resources?  Are 600% of the day shift and 200% of the night shift assigned?  If I have an autoscheduled Effort Driven task and assign 600% of the Day shift and enter the 100 hours of work, the task duration is 2.08 days with 48 hours on day 1 and day 2 and then 4 hours on day 3. If I then assign 200% of the night shift, the night shift gets 25 of the 100 hours of work (25% based upon 2 out of a total of 8 resources) working.  The task duration drops to 1.56 days.