In my company we have been setup to track work by hours per task. We have a system that gives us reports of our employees and how many hours they worked on each task and subtask within the two week time period. I take these reports and enter them into an MS Project 2010 for each person. They are entered for each “sub task” on how many hours they work on for each task and figure out the burn rate. All my projects are DURATION DRIVEN and can’t move the end date for each task. Do or die the TASK dates have to stay. The people we assign can change and we can put more people on the project but this should not shift the end date back and forth.
This is the following stuff that I have done so far.
1) Created a project as a Master Plan with Sub Projects and a Resource Pool.
2) I setup under the project to be Fixed Work under: “File” + “Options” + “Schedule” + “Default Task Type: Fixed Work”.
For example the Report would look like this:
Project 1 Report
John TASK 1 SubTask 1 30 hours 3/22/12 from 4/6/12
Joe TASK 1 SubTask 1 5 hours 3/22/12 from 4/6/12
Katie TASK 1 SubTask 1 2 hours 3/22/12 from 4/6/12
And so forth….
Here are my questions about MS Project 2010
1) I am assigning hours to my resources and the units are not updating to reflect the actual resource Units. To eliminate resource conflicts I go and change the resource allocation to %5 for each resource. Which I know is not right but then I assign hours to each resource that is defiantly over %5. At this point all looks good still. This gets rid of the resource conflicts but then also introduces other problems. If I change the days for the TASK 1 then it recalculates all the employees hours based on the 5% rather than the hours.
2) Why is Project 2010 recalculating its hours based on Units always? Can we change that to be hours so that when we change the hours for the person on task 1 that this would change the units automatically and if we change the duration of TASK 1 from 30 days to 60 days the HOURS stay constant but the UNITS get recalculated? Is there a setting in Project that lets you reconfigure this?
3) For DURATION based project planning what settings would be the best setup for my project?
4) My resources will be allocated in various projects and I want to increase their hours and decrease them based on demand but not change the Task 1 end date. I want the units to update not the hours. How do you force the units to update automatically when you change the hours for a person?
5) Switching everything to manual mode is that a good option? Will I be updating every date and hours for every task manually? Will my reports give me good charts to see the burn rate?
6) Can MS Project 2010 be used effectively in Duration based project management?
Note: Please follow the screen shots I uploaded as to the sequence of events that demonstrate the problem.
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