Hi,

I’ve got a question from one of my Blog Readers: “Dear Nenad, I have a problem with Fixed Work Task Type in MS PROJECT. When I add resource to a Fixed Work Task Type, and Task is Manually Scheduled, I get a wrong result! Is this a Bug, or what?”

No, this is not a Bug. I will show you how does it work in MS PROJECT 2016!

First I am going to create two Tasks, and both of them will be Fixed Work.

and then:

and I will get:

Now I am going to make them as a Fixed Work Type (I will show you how to do it in Task 1):

I will create two Resources:

Now I am going to assign John to Task 1, and Task 2, as well:

John is overallocated, but this is not important for this scenario. Now I am going to change Task 2 to Manually Scheduled mode:

I will now assign Mary to Task 1:

and I will get:

As you can see, 24 hours work from John is split among John and Mary equally, because they are both 100% assigned for the Task. Since John and Mary are going to work 12 hours each, Duration is now shorter, and it is 1,5 days instead of previous 3 days.

I will do the same thing (assign Mary) to Task 2, which is manually scheduled Task, and I will get:

It seems like a bug because work is not split among Mary and John, and it acts like this Task is not effort driven. But this is not a bug. When you are using Manually Scheduled Tasks, you can not choose (it is dimmed) Task Type. Why? Because formula DURATION * UNITS = WORK doesn’t work, because Duration field in Manually Scheduled mode is not numeric, but it is text type in this case. I will show you that. I am going to change Duration field from 3 Days to BLABLABLA:

To conclude, Task Type make sense with Auto Scheduled Tasks, because in that case Duration field is numeric, and magic formula (DURATION * UNITS = WORK) can work. And, logically, choosing Task Type is only valuable when you let Project to make calculation for you, and that is only possible with Auto Scheduled Tasks.

Regards!