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What is Project, and what isn’t it?

• Microsoft Project Spread Task Over Time Crossword
• Microsoft Project Spread Task Over Time Calculator
• Microsoft Project Task Board

Microsoft Project is a very misunderstood application. It is reminiscent of other Office applications, with menus and toolbars like Word, and tables and graphs like Excel, but when you get into it, you see it’s very different. In some ways, it seems to do things on its own.

Hi, a lot of MS PROJECT users are confused with using Task Usage View in MS PROJECT 2016, when tracking actual work not day per day, but week per week! I will show you how MS PROJECT 2016 works in a simple example. Weekly time sheet with tasks and overtime. Have your employees complete this time sheet each week. The template includes a place for documenting the project name, tasks worked on, regular hours, and overtime hours. The totals are calculated automatically.

Project is the most narrowly focused of all the Office applications. While the other Microsoft Office programs tend to be broad and general in their application, Microsoft Project is designed exclusively to manage resource usage and project scheduling.
It will not manage your project for you. It will not stop you from giving your resources too much to do. It will not tell you what is going to happen, but it will let you know what might happen if nothing changed. Just like any other software, Project should be used as an informational system and not as a crystal ball.
Project will help you keep track of the progress of your tasks. It will help you figure out how much each of your resources is doing on your project. It will make it easier to communicate the status of your project.
If you’re new to Project or considering this software as a solution, I’ll explain the basics of Microsoft Project over the next few articles. Let’s begin with a look at how Microsoft Project calculates Work, Duration, and Units.
Microsoft Project series
This is the first of four articles running in IT Consultant and IT Manager Republics designed to provide an introduction to this popular project-management solution. The next installment in this series will discuss entering tasks, making work estimates, deciding task types, and creating dependencies between tasks.
Duration = Work/assignment Units
The calculation of Work, Duration, and Units is the single biggest trouble spot for new users of Project. This calculation is the core of what Project does and it cannot be turned off, so you

Microsoft Project Spread Task Over Time Crossword

must deal with it.
Duration = Work/assignment Units: This equation is the E=MC² of Project. It means that, given the other settings in Project—like how many hours in a day, etc.—the assignment Duration (in hours) is equal to the assignment Work (in hours) divided by the assignment Units value. Units are the percentage of a resource’s workday, or the amount of the day the project team member is expected to work on a given assignment. For example, if you want Joe to work half-time on a task, you would assign him at 50 percent Units.
If a resource’s workday is eight hours and he or she is assigned to work on a task at 100% Units (for eight hours of work), then the Duration is eight hours (one day by default).
Now let’s say you change the Units to 50%. Then the Duration becomes 16 hours or two days, because if a person is working half of an eight-hour day on this task, then it will take them 16 hours (two days) to complete eight hours of work.
Lots of people will attempt to argue with this formula, but save your breath and time by just accepting it. It is a Microsoft Project truism, and even if you do not agree with it, this formula is what Project uses.
Everything that Project does is based in some way on the calculations that this formula makes.
Task types
The way that Project gives you some control over how this formula affects your Project is through the task type function.
The task type options are:

Microsoft Project Spread Task Over Time Calculator

• Fixed Units
• Fixed Work
• Fixed Duration

Microsoft Project Task Board

As you might guess from the names, they allow you to “fix” one of the three elements of the equation in order to control what will be adjusted to make the two sides equate.

The Advanced tab on the Task Information menu allows you to choose whether you’d like to fix the value of Units, Work, or Duration.

As you’ll recall from junior-high algebra, if you have a three-element equation and you hold one value fixed, then if you change a second value, the third value must change to keep the equation true. For example:
1 day Duration = 8 hours Work /100% Units
If we create this as a Fixed Duration task type and then change the Units to 50%, Project automatically will change the Work value to four hours.
If we set the task to Fixed Work, then the same change in Units would cause Project to adjust the Duration value to two days. And, if we set the task to Fixed Duration and edited Work to 16 hours, Project would adjust the Units value to 200% in order to keep the Duration value fixed yet still balance the equation.
That said, the best way to become familiar with this function is to create a test Project, play with the settings, and see how Project reacts to changing data or adding actual work.

In this post we’ll discuss how to split tasks in Microsoft Project. In other words, how to break tasks into segments representing the exact times work will be performed.

Microsoft Project tasks do not necessarily need to start on one day, and continue until the task is complete. They can be broken up into segments. In other words, work can be performed in a discontinguous fashion. For instance, 16 hours in one week, 16 hours in the next week, and a final 4 hours the following week. This technique is illustrated below. Steps to perform it as also included.

Split bar, showing each segment of work

Split hours, in Task Usage view

I must warn you… I feel this is a micro-management technique. It can be good to define exactly when the work will be performed, right down to the hour, but do you really want to spend your time doing that? That’s better left to the discretion of engineers who will actually be doing the work.

Follow these steps to split Microsoft Project tasks:

1. Create a new task in the Gantt view (See the View menu)
2. Right-click in the header area, and choose Insert Column
3. Insert the Work column (it represents the planned work for a task)
4. Enter 10 hours for the Work
5. Choose View, Task Usage
6. Notice the number of hours for each day (this is the time you will work on the task)
7. Skip a few days, and enter some additional hours into the Task Usage view
8. Choose View, Gantt Chart to return to the preview view
9. Notice that the Gantt bar has been split to show the new hours

–ray