Hi,

Today I’m going to explain how to solve a problem which one of my Blog Readers have in MS PROJECT 2016.

Let us say that we have a Project with Task which is 6 weeks long. For this Task we have to hire external Consultant – Mary, and she will spend 8 hours per week, e.g. 48 hours in Total.

Firs I will create brand new Task with 6 weeks Duration and 48 hours of Work:

Notice, that Task is Fixed Duration type, because this is Demanded.

I will create one Resource – Mary the Consultant:

now I will assign Mary to the Task:

You can see that Mary is only 20% occupied on the Task, because she has to accomplish 48 hours in 6 weeks, which is 8 hours per week which is 8 hours / 5 days per week = 1,6 hours per day, and this is 20% of her capacity which is 8 hours per day.

OK, Let me switch to the Task Usage View, and on the Timescale I will show Months at the Middle Tier, and Weeks in the Bottom Tier, like this:

Now let’s say that Mary has worked 4 hours for first week. If I put it here like:

I will get:

But this is now what I wanted. I wanted to put 4 hours as Actual work (what I did), and that remaining work for this week is 0 hours (e.g. that Work, and Actual work are the same), and for all other weeks Work is the same (8 hours).

To make long story short, there is only one way to do it. For example, if Mary worked 4 hours at first and second week, and I want that remaining hours are 8 hours per week for the rest of those 4 weeks I should manually enter those numbers in the timescale:

So I put 4 hours at Work, and Actual Work. And you can see on the left part of the screen that Remaining work is 32 hours (8 hours per week per 4 weeks left).

So yes, it can be done but manually.

Regards!