Project Summary task not obeying exception working hours.

Question

Hi all,

I'm having a frustrating problem. I'm new to project but have basic understandings of how it should work.

I have a project which runs on a normal Gregorian calendar (mon to fri, 9 - 5).

We have an implementation section which requires a single weekend working with 12 hour days.

I have changed the project working hours to add exception days for the 2 weekend days when we are working and the auto schedule is now showing tasks on those working days as expected.

On the Saturday I have a total of 12 hours worth of work (made up of 6 x 2 hour duration) and this is indented under a summary task. On the Gannt chart, the tasks show as all being scheduled for the Saturday and stretch over the exceptional working hours I have entered in the project working time screen. 

The problem is that the duration of the summary task is saying 1.2 days. so everything above the standards 7 working hours is being said as occurring on an additional day. This is misleading to the project execs and I want this to show as one day as it is all part of the current working day, albeit an exceptional working day.

Can anyone tell me what is going wrong here?

Answer 1

As Rod says, there is nothing wrong with MSP, but there is a mis-understanding or a mis-interpretation of what it is displaying.

There is a good reason for the way it is displayed. Basically, "day" is an ambiguous measurement of a certain amount of time, and the way MSP deals with that is to convert it to a defined number of hours, which is not ambiguous, according to the conversion factor specified in File, Options, Schedule. You say 1 day= 8 hours, or some other number of hours, but you only get to provide one conversion for the whole project. "day" is only allowed to mean one thing.

A couple of ways to make this clearer, perhaps, is to choose to enter all durations in hours so there is never any need for the conversion, and always display the time as well as the date. Both are available in File, Options.

Also, provide an explanation for the audience so you don't have to endure ill-informed nit-picking.

Answer 2

This is by design. 8h is one day so 12h is 1.5d and so on. You can only set the hours per day conversion rate for the whole project, not per task. Either educate the execs or copy Duration to a custom text field and edit as you want. I recommend the first!