Hi,

here is the question from my Blog reader:

“Nenad:
Thanks very much for the posting!
Do you know if there is any way of setting up a different default for this operation? More specifically, suppose that I have many tasks assigned to “John” and I want to reduce the project time by hiring another person (it could be “Mary”) to share the work with John. If I simply add Mary to all tasks, MSP would assume that all I want to increase the amount of work all those tasks need – which is not the reason I’m adding Mary.
Would I have to add Mary one task after another, changing each one individually to “Reduce duration so the task end sooner, but requires same amount of work (person-hours)”? Or is that a way of adding Mary to all tasks with the “Reduce duration…” option?”

I wrote about that in one of my previous posts, but I will explain this issue again with MS PROJECT 2013.

First of all, where is the difference between Effort Driven, and Non Effort Driven Tasks in MS PROJECT 2013?

Effort driven Tasks are those which will (if you do not change it manually), reduce duration if you assign additional Resource to the Task. For example, if you have PAINT THE WALL Task, and it has duration = 4 days, and you have only one Resource assign to that task, when you add new Resource to that Task, duration will be 2 days!

On the other hand, Non effort driven Tasks are those which will not (if you do not change it manually), reduce duration if you assign additional Resource to the Task, but it will increase total amount of work (hours). For example, if you have READ THE BOOK Task, and it has duration = 4 days, and you have only one Resource assign to that task, when you add new Resource to that Task, duration will still be 4 days, but the total amount of work for that Task will be 4 days * 2 Resources * 8 hours/day = 64 hours.

Let me show you that. I have those two Tasks here:

and I have two Resources:

I will Assign John to the Paint the wall Task, and Mary to the Read the Book  Task, and I will get:

Let’s see where can we find if the Task is or is not effort driven:

Now I have Paint the wall as effort driven Task, and Read the Book, as Non effort driven Task.

Now I am going to assign Mary to the Paint the wall Task:

and I will get:

Now let’s see Read the Book Task:

You can see that the Task in Non effort driven, and that Mary will spend 32 hours of work (4 days * 8 hours per day).

I will add John to that Task:

and I will get:

You can see that Duration is same, and John will spend additional 32 hours on that Task, so it takes total of 64 hours for that Task.

But what if you always want shorter Task duration, after assigning additional resource, so you do not have to make each Task effort driven manually. You can do it here: File->Options, and than:

That’s it! Regards!