Hi,

I got a Business Case from my Blog Reader wit, of course, a problem. I will go step by step through it with MS PROJECT 2016!

In Italic font is my blog reader Text

1. I created a Task A – non-effort-driven, fixed units with Duration= 5d, Work = 60h (this will be calculated)

2. Task A has two resources assigned at their max capacity: John at 100% and Tom at 50%. , John’s standard hourly cost  is $100/h, Tom’s $200/h

and:

I will switch to the Task Usage View now:

3. Planned Works for individual resource over the planned task duration are:  for John = 40h and for Tom 20h (See Picture above)

4. I enter actual 40h of actual work for one of the resources (John) (for this I will add two Columns in Task Usage View):

Project calculates Actual task Duration as 3.33d (Actual Work / Total Units = 40h/150%) which equals to 67% Complete for that task.

Here is my question:

While understanding that 40h/8h per day = 5d of the duration,  there is a little confusion with the Actual Duration of 3.33d.
Shouldn’t the Actual Work of 40h for John same as the Actual Work for the task as a whole be distributed over these 3.33 days and NOT over the original planned duration of 5 days as it’s shown in the Task Usage view?    That is, if  John’s Actual Work is spanned over Actual Duration of 3.33d,  then John’s Actual Work should be 26.4d because 24h over the first 3 days (8h/day * 3days)  plus another 2.64 h for the part of the day 4 (8hrs/day * 0.33 day) of a total of 24+2.64 = 26.4h instead of 40h.

The answer is – NO. This is misunderstanding! How MS PROJECT calculates Actual Duration:

1. How many hours are scheduled per day? 12 (8 for John, and 8 for Tom)
2. How many hours was John working during 5 days. 40! (8 hours per day)?
3. Actual Duration is 40 hours (actual) / 12 hours (planned per day) = 3.33 (actual Duration). Or you can calculate like this: 40 hours (Actual) / 60 hours (Planned) * 5 days (Planned) = 3.33 (Actual days)

The problem is that you should understand that if you put 40 hours actual for John that means that John has worked as planned, e.g. 8 hours per day 5 days.

But, since Tom didn’t work at all, the actual duration is calculated as I explained above!

Hope this helps.

Regards!