Hi,

often I have a question like this: “How to assign Work to someone when that work is not to be linked with any specific Task?”. I will show you how with MS PROJECT 2016!

But first I have to explain the scenario. Is it possible to have work for someone, and that work IS NOT linked to specific Task? The answer is – YES! For example, let’s say that you are Project manager. And, for this scenario I WILL NOT consider regular meeting, which are covered with recurring Tasks.

As a project manager you can have little work. For example, when you are finished with planning, you monitor and control the execution of the Project, and since everything goes perfect, at the end of the Project, you will close it. So, you as a Project manager has a regular work, and you can assign that work to tasks like Planning, Reporting Closing. And this is scenario is fairy tale! Project, always ha a problems. And guess what! you can not plan when will it occur. You cam mitigate Risks o avoid them using proper Risk manager, but problems will almost always occur. So you must plan some hours for solving them. for example you will have to go to meeting with the Customer to find out where are the problems, you will how to figure out with your team, how to solve it, you will have some reports to write and so on. On the other hand, beside the problem, you will have to do some administrative work, which are not regular, ant there is no easy way to determine when will you have to do that work.

So, for those situations you will have to plan some hours. And since you do not know when will you do the work, you will use Manually scheduled tasks: Your Project might looks like this:

As you can see, I put 120 hours to Project Management Task, and I assigned Project manager to it, but I left Duration, and Start Date and End Date empty, because I do not know when this work will be performed.

this Task is in relation to End of the Project Task, because due to best practice not a single task in a Project should be an orphan.

Let’s see Task Usage View:

As you can see work is spread along some dates, but this  not important, since those hours are Planned! And one important thing. If I assign, for example, Project manager to Task 1 Phase 2 I will get:

Let’ s see Resource Usage View:

At Monday and Tuesday Project manger is supposed to work 16 hour per day, but he is not shown as over allocated, because Project management Task is Manually Scheduled. And this is correct. We do not have exact Start date and End date, so this resource should not be over allocated.

Now we can save the Baseline:

and:

Now, let’s say that Project manager has worked 4 hours on the Project management Task at 22.08.2017 and 23.08.2017. you can put those hours on actual work in Task Usage View:

Now in Gant Chart View, you will get:

and It does make a sense.

So, this is on way of using resources and their efforts on non specific Task assigned.

Regards!