Hi,

again a question from one of My Blog Readers:

“What if you work 9 hrs per day mon to thurs and 8 hrs per day friday for week 1, and for week 2 you work 9 hrs per day mon to thursday, no work on fri. So week 1 is 44 hrs and week 2 is 36 hrs. I can specify all this in the working calendar, but in the scheduling options, you can only choose a certain no of hrs per day, and a certain no of hrs per week, and this would differ from the working calendar, which would lead to errors. What’s you advice on such a situation?”

Ufffff! Let’s start with MS PROJECT 2013! First of all:

then:

and:

Notice that it is 8 Hours Per Day!

Now I am going to rearrange Standard Calendar:

and:

I do not have to do anything for Friday/12/13/2013, because it is already scheduled as 8 hour working day.

I’m going to set up second week:

Finally I’ll set Friday/12/20/2013 as a non working day:

Now, I’ll add Task with 10 days Duration:

and I’ll assign John (who works on Standard Calendar) to the Task:

After Assigning John To Task 1I’ll get:

Now, let’s take a look at the Task Usage View:

Let me explain:

Because I said that one day will have 8 hours for working (look at the top of this Post) the Calculation is: This Task 1 needs 10 days of duration * 8 hours per day = 80 hours. So, for completing this Task we will need to work 80 hours on it! Because John will work on Standard Calendar he will work first week from Monday to Thursday 9 hours per day (4*9=36 hours), 8 hours on Friday, which is 36+8=44 hours at First week, and Second week he will work 9 hours per day (from Monday to Thursday, 4*9=36 hours), and he will not work on Friday. Total is: 44 hours at first week + 36 hours at second week = 80 hours.

This is how MS PROJECT works! What will be if I change in Scheduling options that it is 9 hours per day:

Back to the Task Usage View:

Because I said that one day will have 9 hours for working (look at the top of this Post) the Calculation is: This Task 1 needs 10 days of duration * 9 hours per day = 90 hours. So, for completing this Task we will need to work 90 hours on it! Because John will work on Standard Calendar he will work first week from Monday to Thursday 9 hours per day (4*9=36 hours), 8 hours on Friday, which is 36+8=44 hours at First week, and Second week he will work 9 hours per day (from Monday to Thursday, 4*9=36 hours), and he will not work on Friday. Total is: 44 hours at first week + 36 hours at second week = 80 hours. We need 10 hours more to complete this Task, So John will work 8 hours at Monday and 2 hours at Tuesday at third week.

Be very careful! When you change working hours from 8 to 9, for example, all Tasks will be affected by that.

So that’s it! I hope that this explains MS PROJECT behavior

Regards!