Hello,

today I’m going to deal whit one significant question which basically has many answers, or none. How many hours to assign to Resource per day?

Let me show you one very, very simple example. Let’s say that we have a simple Project with one Task, 5 days duration in MS PROJECT 2016:

OK! Task has to have Resource (or Resources), to work on it, to finish it. If I assign John to this Task, and John is 100% available, and he is working 8 hours per day, I will get:

Let’s take a look at John’s working time:

As you can see, John is supposed to work from 08:00 AM to Noon, then he has a break (1 hour), and then he is supposed to work from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, e.g. he is supposed to work 8 hours per day.

Let’s face it! No one will work all the time. During your work each and every day, you have to go to the rest room, you will grab a cup of coffee or tea, you will make few phone calls, you will be interrupted from your coworker, boss, name it!

What is best thing to do? Well, there is no magic answer on that question. I will show you what I do, but this does not mean that you should do it! First of all my Project is set up like this:

and:

As you can see my working day is 7 hours per day!

I also set up Standard Calendar, which I use like this:

Now I will create Task again and I will assign John and I will get:

Is this what I wanted? Not at all. Now I’ve got that John will work 7 hours per day, and that it will be enough 35 hours in total for the Task. But! since I work with IT projects, I always estimate hours needed per Resource to accomplish the Task, and Duration is calculated. So, let’s say that for accomplishing the Task John has to work 40 hours in total. I will assign him like this:

and I will get:

As you can see, Duration is now 5,71 days, and john will work 7 hours per day from Monday to Friday, and the remaining work of 5 hours will be done next Monday. And Duration? It is 5 days (from Monday to Friday), and 5/7= 0,71 day!

Why I use this approach? Because it is most realistic. I know that john will work 7 hours max on a Project per day! I know how many hours do I need for the Task. And Duration is calculated!

But what if Task has fixed duration, for example 5 days, and still 40 hours are needed for this Task:

I will get:

I this case John is overallocated, which is perfectly logical.

So, you should choose your own approach to deal with this “problem”. Every one is good one if it suits you.

Regards!