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Microsoft Project is a widely-used scheduling tool. Its quirks and complications are a huge drain of time on the Project Management community. This series will go beyond tips and tricks to discuss solutions to real-life problems, to save time for its many users.
Calendars have a profound effect upon a project schedule. Holidays and vacations can conspire to make a task finish days or weeks later than expected. Keeping track of these key dates by hand is impossible for large-scale projects. Ignoring their effect causes missed delivery dates.
Fortunately MS Project contains a rich selection of tools to manage calendars. Unfortunately, powerful tools require discipline and planning to use effectively. Below find some techniques to solve real-life problems.
The Default Calendar: A Recipe for Forced Overtime
By default, MS Project uses a 40-hour week with no holidays and no vacations. By default, all resources can devote 100% of their time to the project schedule, 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. If the project manager does not adjust these defaults for non-project time, he or she is virtually guaranteeing either a late project or forced overtime to make the dates. In reality, no resource can spend 100% of their time accomplishing project work; non-project work must account for some part of everyone’s day.
There are a few ways to compensate for non-project time:
- Reduce the allocation for all resources to less than 100%
- Enter all scheduled time off into MS Project and enter dummy tasks for non-scheduled, non-project time
- Reduce the estimated work-hours for each resource below 40 hours per week
Ignoring the problem is not a reasonable choice.
The first choice, setting resource utilization below 100% is a very reasonable approach, and is simple to do with good resource-leveling techniques. See my “Dependencies and Leveling” article for more information.
The other approaches all involve some use of the calendar functions in MS Project. Calendars help to model real-life project constraints accurately.
Creating a Default Schedule for the Project
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The standard MS Project calendar is a 40-hour workweek with no holidays
MS Project ships with a “Standard” schedule, enabled for all new projects by default. It provides a standard 40-hour workweek: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 1 hour for lunch at noon. It is tempting to jump in and begin modifying this schedule, changing it to suit your company’s real work schedule. Doing so can be dangerous, particularly when sharing schedules with other managers who may have a different “Standard” schedule.
Instead, under the Tools…Change Working Time… dialog box, use the “New” button to create a new calendar. Name it “My Company – Standard”, substituting your company’s name before the dash. Block out non-work days to start, using your company holiday schedule. Naming the calendar after your company recognizes the fact that different companies have different holiday schedules. If you use contractors or partner with other companies, you can always add other schedules to model their holiday calendar.
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How Many Project-Hours Per Day?
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Define a new calendar for your company with holidays work hours that allow for non-project work
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No project participant spends 100% of his or her day on project work. Everyone needs some time to deal with administration, phone calls, routine non-project questions, and e-mail. It is possible to create dummy tasks in the plan for every resource to account for these hours, but it is even simpler to adjust the calendar to allow fewer work-hours per week. Personally I have had success scheduling resources anywhere from 32.5 hours to 36.25 hours per week (6 ½ hours per day to 7 ¼ hours per day). Simply change the working hours for a standard week from an eight hour day to a standard early close. For instance, I enter a 6 ½ hour day as 9 a.m. to 12 noon and 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Use your historical records to figure out the right number of work-hours for your team. Remember to account for unexpected and expected events: non-project work, sick days, unscheduled holidays, inclement weather, long lunches for farewell or welcome parties, and so on. When in doubt, plan on a shorter workday and build a schedule that your team can beat.
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Assigning Calendars to Resources
- Tip: you cannot copy and paste the name of the new schedule into multiple resources, but you can “Fill” the same value across many resources. See Help…Index…Fill for step-by-step directions.
MS Project will not use the new schedule until you apply it to your resources. Go to the Resource Sheet for the schedule and select the new schedule as the “Base Calendar” for all the resources in your company. If multiple people have alternate work arrangements, like night shift work or a standard 4/40 work week, consider creating another base calendar for that group of people, and assigning them to the new base calendar.
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Setting Individual Calendars
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Resource calendars drive the schedule for the tasks in a plan
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Each resource also has his or her own personal calendar, which builds on his or her base calendar. The project manager can enter days off as scheduled for each individual resource. MS Project will respect the work calendar for each resource assigned to a task. There is some up-front cost to the manager, entering all this data into MS Project. Once entered, MS Project will not allow scheduling a critical assignment in the middle of someone’s two-week vacation. Preventing just one such blunder is worth hours of data entry.
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Why Do I Need a Project Calendar?
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Set the Project Calendar from the Project Information dialog box
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One of the more obscure settings in MS Project is the Project Calendar setting. Like the resource calendars, it will be “Standard” unless the manager changes its value. In general, it is best to change this setting to the company’s standard work schedule. Find this setting under Project…Project Information….
The effect of this setting is subtle. It drives the display of holidays in the Calendar views in MS Project. Tasks are scheduled according to the Project Calendar if there are no resources assigned to the task yet. Forgetting to change this setting can cause unexpected results in a plan, so do update the value.
What Comes First?
It is critical to know what schedule governs each task. With a project schedule and multiple resource schedules all interacting, there must be an order of precedence. MS Project uses the following order of precedence:
- Use the resources’ calendars if they exist. The start and end date of the task is driven by the earliest start date and the latest end date out of all the resources assigned to the task.
- Uses the project schedule if there are no resources assigned to a task.
A five-day task will fill five working days if no resources are assigned. Once a resource is assigned, though, its calendar governs. The five day task will expand to fill six working days, if the resource happens to have a day off in the middle. MS Project warns the user when making these types of changes, but they can make schedule changes unpredictable as a result.
Where multiple resources must contribute to the same task, be careful. Use the Resource Schedule split-screen view to see when each resource begins and ends their work. Changing one resources’ work on a task will not change the task end date if there is another resource on the task whose scheduled work ends later. Consider avoiding this whole complexity by creating separate tasks for each resource, and a milestone to track the end date for the joint task.
MS Project 2000 and 2002 provide an advanced technique that gives some additional control: task calendars. Give a task a task calendar, and work takes place only for those hours where its resources’ calendars and the task calendar both have work time. This tool allows modeling tasks that can only be performed at certain times of day or at certain times of year, due to weather, noise regulations, or other complex criteria. There is even an option to ignore the resource calendar, assigning work even during non-working hours for the resource. Using a task calendar and ignoring resource calendars will schedule resources to work on their days off, so use the option cautiously. Each task in a schedule can have different settings for these options, so this is a powerful tool to control scheduling very precisely but it also can quickly add complexity to schedule maintenance.
MS Project provides a rich set of tools to schedule complex situations. Use them carefully to avoid losing control of your own schedule.
Fixed-Duration Tasks and Calendars
One reader e-mailed me a recommendation to avoid fixed duration tasks, contrary to my recommendation in an earlier article. Calendar changes can change a “fixed” duration. Interestingly, MS Project 98 ignores resource calendars for fixed-duration tasks; MS Project 98 acts the way this reader expects, keeping duration fixed no matter what. With MS Project 2000 and 2002 the tool adjusts fixed-duration tasks because of resource calendar changes; adding a holiday for the resource increases the duration of the task, but ironically removing a holiday does not reduce the duration of the task. Task duration remains fixed during resource assignment, regardless of resource calendars in all versions; MS Project 2000 and 2002 does warn the user about the change.
No matter what methods used, the project manager MUST keep a close eye on dates. Understand the side effects of each technique and adjust the schedule as needed.
Calculating Hours, Days, Weeks, and Months
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Changing the Calendar Options changes the calculation and display of hours, days, weeks, and months, but it does not change the schedule
Beware of the Calendar tab in the Tools…Options… dialog box. This appears to allow you to set longer and shorter workdays, by setting default start times, default end times, and hours per day. These values are do not affect scheduling. When a user enters days, weeks, or months for any field in MS Project, this dialog determines how MS Project converts that value into hours. Helpful text on the dialog box recommends synchronizing these values with the standard calendar for your project, but be careful before changing these values. An existing project has all duration values re-calculated every time these conversion ratios are changed. In general, synchronizing the values to the project calendar is wise, though.
Remember: Calendars control work schedules, and Calendar Options control conversion ratios.
Modeling What You Know and What You Do Not Know
Calendars provide the means to model known scheduling issues, like holidays and planned time off for staff. Creative use of calendars allow the manager to model less certain effects, like sick days, by reducing the planned work hours for all resources. Achieve the right balance for your project. The less time spent tracking and entering planned, individual time off, the fewer work hours you should schedule for each resource. The more detailed and accurate the individual resource calendar is, the more work hours can be planned for each day. Adjust estimates based upon actual results to develop an effective, accurate model for your team’s work calendar. MS Project provides a rich set of tools to manage these scheduling decisions.
I am working on a schedule for a Drilling operation that works 24/7. When a well takes 23 days to drill, that means 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Can you help me establish a template for tracking this kind of time frame? THanks!
Great question, Scott. MS Project default settings are for a conventional, office-work-style calendar of 40 work-hours per week. Anyone working with a 24/7 clock needs to make changes, in order to get accurate reflection of work-hours.
MS Project does have a default 24-hour calendar included when you install, but it is not selected by default. I recommend setting your project calendar to the 24/7 calendar. That will help with the tasks that have no resources assigned.
You also should create special calendars for your various shifts. Often I see drilling operations with unusual shifts, particularly offshore drilling. People may be out on the rig for several weeks at a time, working seven days per week for an eight-hour or even 12-hour shift every day. Other drilling operations are run with three eight-hour shifts working five days a week, with some sort of overlap or special shift to cover the remaining two days per week.
Write down your shift patterns and the single-employee exceptions. Figure out how many calendars to create, to help maintain the work properly. You will need at least two calendars (if you do two 12-hour shifts), but you might need many more to cover the various days of the week and times of day that people come off and on shift. The “night shift” calendar included in MS Project will give you a model to start with.
Once you have your calendars defined, you can set up your resources, and assign the correct calendar to each resource. Then make individual exceptions as needed for each resource.
MS Project can help for scheduling this type of work, because it will track when each resource is on and off shift. If you assign two people to the same task from two different shifts, you will see strange effects because they never work the same hours. Watch your calendars carefully, and the tool should help you a lot.
Also, if you want to simplify your MS Project administration work, you can ignore the shift issues entirely. Just create general resources like “engineer” or “laborer” and assign them all to a 24-hour calendar. Of course, this sacrifices the ability to see who is doing what when, but it makes administration of the schedule simpler.
Best of luck!
Hello,
I am new to MS Project, I need to allocate a work resource with max-units calculated per week, e.g. a person which is available for 10 hrs per week. My problem is that I don’t want to limit the resource to an equel distribution along the week, i.e. it is possible for him to work all his 10 hrs in the same day of the week, as long as he won’t work on any other day at that week. Currently it seems that when I set Max Unit of this resource to 25% , which based on the standerd calander of 40 hrs per week, is 10 hrs per week, MS project aotumatically distributes these 10 hrs along the week, i.e. 2 hrs per day, and will warn for over-allocation if this person works more then 2 hours, which is not what I wanted. Can you help me with this?
Thank you!
Ziv
MS Project enforces the “max units” value not just at the weekly level, but also at the daily level. If you zoom down, you will see that it is even enforced in 15-minute increments. A 25% resource assignment will make that resource work no more than 3.75 minutes in any 15-minute period!
Most of the time we do not really care about the schedule down to that level of detail. You have a few different options:
1. Decide that you are just scheduling at a weekly level. Ignore the fact that the task stretches for an entire week. You know it will really be done on one particular day, but do not let duration listed in MS Project bother you.
2. If the task MUST be done on a particular day, then schedule it as a 100% or higher assignment for that particular day. MS Project will flag the day as an overallocation, but ignore the warning and schedule it that way anyway.
3. Use the options in the “Resource Leveling” dialog box. Change the “Look for overallocations” option from the default “day-by-day” to a “week-by-week” basis. MS Project will still flag the resource as overallocated in some views, but it will ignore the overallocation in others.
4. Increase the “max units” for this resource to 100% or higher, but then manually level the work load for that resource to a lower level. This will eliminate the overallocation warnings, but it requires that you manually set a lower work load for every other task.
5. Set a variable work-unit schedule for your resource. Allow them to work 100% or higher for a particular day, but drop their availability down to 20% or lower for the rest of the project. You can do this either by specifying a variable availability percentage in the resource view, or by setting different working hours in the work calendar for this resource.
DO NOT change the settings in both places, or your problem will start multiplying. For instance, if I set a resource to be available to work ONLY between 8 am and 10 am every day in the calendar, and then assign them a maximum unit amount of 25%, I will wind up having them spend only 25% of 2 hours per day on my project.
Personally, I usually wind up manually scheduling a particular date as an overallocation, and then ignoring the warnings from MS Project (#2). If the end-date is really not important, I just ignore the issue entirely (#1).
Hi,
I have a question on how the [hours per day] setting in the [Options/Calendar] and work time calendar works. I will explain my problem by an example.
Suppose I have a Calendar where from Monday to Thursday I have a 8 day schedule(8.00AM-12.00PM and 1.00PM-5.00PM) and on Friday I have a 4 day schedule(8.00AM-12.00PM). Also I have a task starting from a Monday(Mon 4/6/09) and ends on the Friday of the same week(Fri 4/10/09). So logically my duration should be 5 days. But depending on the setting [hours per day] the duration gets recalculated every time I change it. I think this setting can never have a general value in a case like mine. Is there any other way I can ignore this value and use the Calendar days instead?
Thanks you!
\Sri
Sri,
I am glad you experimented with the Options/Calendar settings. It sounds like you understand them completely now. The “hours per day” does not actually change the start and end date on the tasks. It just changes the displayed number of days in the “duration” column and in other areas.
Your sample “five day” task has four eight-hour days (Mon to Thu), then a four-hour Friday, for a total of 36 hours for the week and for the task. If you enter “8″ as the hours in a day, then MS Project will show that as a 4.5 day task.
You could enter “7.2″ as the number of hours in a day, and then MS Project would call this a 5-day task. I do not recommend doing so, because it will also turn a full-day task on Monday into a 1.11 day task.
In short, there is no way to fix your problem with these settings.
The only possible solution I can imagine is to create a custom formula. Use a user-defined column, and build a formula that calculates the value that you want to show. If you want to ignore holidays, give special treatment for Fridays, and other special processing, the formula could be quite complex. If you just want to know the number of elapsed days between the start and finish date, though, that is a simple calculation (difference between start and end date, rounded off to the nearest day). This formula (end date minus start date) should give you the calendar-days metric that you were asking for.
–Alex
We are having calendar issues with Project. I know that if you define the calendar for the project before entering tasks usually the special hours/days work correctly. But of course, we already have the tasks all entered for a shutdown project. This project is Wednesday through Sunday with the work day of 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM with half hour lunch. We have changed all the tasks to the new calendar, but still the tasks that start on the first day look like they are at 8:00 instead of 7:00. What are we missing?
Dear Mr Brown,
I become your fan when I red all what you did helping some of us, the beginners, to start really using the MSP. I am not beginner but still newcomer using MSP and I faced very difficult problem from day one. My company has very strange working calendar as we are part of international corporation. Our business calendar is not same as standard calendar as months are not starting/ending on usual dates, more precisely it looks like:
Jan 05. 01- 30. 01
Feb 31. 01- 27. 02
Mar 28. 02- 03. 04
Apr 04. 04- 01. 05
May 02. 05- 29. 05
Jun 30. 05- 03. 07
Jul 04. 07- 31. 07
Aug 01. 08- 28. 08
Sep 29. 08- 02. 10
Oct 03. 10- 30. 10
Nov 31. 10- 27. 11
Dec 28. 11- 31. 12
How I can make this calendar in MSP as my default calendar?
Sincerely yours
Haris Hadzialic
Hello,
I noticed that in the previous question, you mentioned something about formulas. I think I need to use them for my project. The problem I have is that I need to create a custom calendar based in semesters rather than months or hours. I need to set a list of tasks to be completed in one semester or trimester, but not in hours, days or months.
I would like to know if this is possible.
Now, according to the standard settings if I schedule any task in hours per semester, by the time it runs two or more years, the calendar will be out of sync.
Any suggestions? Or is there a way to make a script, program, file, or anything that can set my own calendar and use the rest of the tools?
Thank you
Danny
I have a very basic question.
After setting Tools, Options, Calculation and check “Move end of completed parts after status date back to status date, And move start of remaining parts back to status date”
These changes seem to be ignored in certain circumstances, particularly when I make the start of the project date some time in the past.
If you have come across any problems like this and work arround solutions then please let me know.
Thankyou
Fred
Fred,
The logic that MS Project uses to move “completed” work is pretty complex. If you have already entered actual work hours for tasks, MS Project is extremely conservative about changing those entries. If you update your schedule through to the end of the month of January, for instance, then reset your status date to 15 January, these automatic settings will not work the way you intend. The parts of the schedule that already have “actual work” logged through to the end of 31 January will generally not be changed, but the uncompleted work may move back to 15 January. The predecessor and successor relationships will also affect which tasks move and which do not.
The best work-arounds that I have seen are to go into any of the “actual work” views, and check for any entries after your status date. If you find any, fix them manually. Once you have fixed any incorrect “actual work” entries by hand, then the automatic features of MS Project work much more smoothly. Also, use the Network Diagram view to see the chain of predecessors and successors in your project. A task might be moved forward in time due to these relationships. Finally, look for the “calendar icon” in the left-most column in the Gantt view. This icon shows that a task has a constraint like “start no later than”. These constraints override any of these settings.
–Alex
You can create scripts to populate a calendar in MS Project using some kind of formula, but for a school calendar, I would recommend creating the calendars by hand. Usually the vacation schedule, semester start and semester end are somewhat unpredictable each year. I think you would find it faster to just type in the revised schedule, instead of writing a Visual Basic script to do it.
If you just want to have a list of tasks for a given semester, I recommend putting the task list in as a set of milestones. Milestones have no duration and will not “drift” if they extend from year to year. You could manually assign the dates for these milestones. Duration is only useful if you need to track both start and end dates. If you just need a “to do” list, then milestones are simpler and should meet your needs.
You could create custom formulas. If you create a formula that returns a result like “First Semester” for any date between the start and end of the semester, you could then show the date for the task as “First Semester” on reports. You could also create formulas to give you the week number. Many classes are scheduled “week 1, week 2, week 3,” etc. Having a formula that shows the “week number” could be very useful.
If I were creating an academic calendar, I would probably not use MS Project as my main scheduling tool, though. Usually academic calendars are quite rigid about start and end dates. MS Project is designed to change start and end dates based on dynamic work assignments. A more traditional classroom scheduling tool, or a paper calendar might be easier to work with.
Haris,
MS Project does not have any concept of “month end” built into it. Unlike an accounting system, there is no “month end closing”, nor are there any “month end reports”.
You can use MS Project calendars to keep track of which days are business days. In order to create reports that match to your company’s business calendar, I would recommend creating a custom formula. Create a custom field and name it something like “Business Month” or “Business Month and Year”. Then create a formula that will take the task start or finish dates, and returns the correct “month”. You can then create views and reports that group tasks or other data based upon this field.
You might also want to keep a section in your project plan with milestones for month-end dates. When I do accounting projects, the day where month-end processing takes place is usually very important. I keep a section called “Month-End Close” and it has one milestone for each month (January Close, February Close, etc.). I set these with a fixed date constraint, so that they will always fall on a certain calendar date.
If you print out a Gantt chart with these milestones on it, you will find it easier to see which tasks begin and end in a certain accounting period. Many of my projects had dependencies on these key dates, so I would use these milestones as predecessors and successors sometimes.
–Alex
Barbara,
Chances are that your “default start time” for tasks is still set to 8:00. Go to “Tools…Options…Calendar” tab and check what the default start time is for your tasks. If it is not set to 7:00, fix that now.
This setting will only help you for new tasks, however. Whenever you enter a date without a time, the default start time will be 7 am now. You still need to fix your existing tasks.
Change your default date/time display in MS Project to a setting that includes the time. Then review your task list, checking the start date for all your tasks. Chances are very good that many of the tasks are set to start at 8 am. Manually correct them, setting them back to 7 am.
Hopefully if your schedule is well-constructed, with accurate durations, predecessors, and successors, you will only need to change a few start dates, and then the other tasks will naturally fall on the correct start/end time.
–Alex
I have a project where task may only require a few hours in the day to complete, but I want to allow resources to have multiple days to complete them.
For example, filling out a form may be a task that only requires 1 hour, but I want to give the resource three days to manage completing the task.
Is there an optimal way to model tasks like these?
-Gregg
There are three good ways that I know to model a task that takes a few hours of work-time and a much longer duration:
1. Allocate the person to the task part-time
If you change the persons “units” to less than 100%, then they will be set as only using a portion of each time-period on the task. So a 5-day task assigned to one person at 20% units will only require 1 work-day.
2. Allocate the person’s work manually
If you switch to any “time-phased” view of the work, you can manually set the person’s work independently of the task start and finish. This has the advantage of allowing you to create a 3-day task, and precisely place one work-hour at the start and another work-hour at the end. MS Project treats it as exactly scheduled work, and does not assume that the person is “partly busy” during the whole duration of the task. Of course, the data entry involved in this method is much greater.
3. Change the person’s calendar
If you give the person only one working hour each week, then assign the person two hours of work, their task will take two weeks. If you adjust their project calendar, you can force MS Project to give a particular task any duration you like.
Which method is best depends on your situation. Do you want MS Project to treat the person as “partly busy” for the whole time? Can you predict the exact timing of work in the task? Is the person available for other work in the meantime, or are you giving the person three days because they can only spend one hour every three days on any project work?
If you think through these questions, you will probably find that one of these methods works better for your particular situation.
I hope this helps!
–Alex
how to define number of working hrs for an uneven days per week.
For example v hv second and fourth saturday holiday .So the working days for even and odd weeks are not same so how to define it in the project calendar?
You go into the “calendar” view and mark the second and fourth Saturday of every month as a “holiday”. There is no “one click” method to make even and odd weeks different. You will have to go through the entire calendar and alternate which days are working and non-working.
It is possible to automate this type of data entry using code, but I would not recommend it. It should not take long to mark up a one- or two-year calendar.
You can then save the calendar in a template MPP file, and share it with others using the “Organizer”.
Is there a way to set predecessor tasks based on true calendar days when the project plan is set for workday timing? For example, we work a 5 day work week and tasks will be calculated by that, but several deadlines reoccur annually as 30 calendar days after another task. I don’t want to have to recalculate these several tasks every year. It would be nice to use predecessors as 12FS+30days, but it counts them as business days and messes everything up. Any suggestions?
MS Project gives you an easy way to count predecessors and successors with “true calendar days”. Use the “edays” unit instead of “days”.
The “edays” unit of time counts the calendar days between the dates, while the default “days” uses only working days. The most common use of this feature is for setting lags for tasks like “allowing the concrete to cure” or “allowing paint to dry”. The drying and curing times are based on actual, elapsed days, not on working days.
Enter your predecessor as “12FS+30edays” and MS Project will count the lag between the two tasks in terms of true calendar days.
My plan involves a time critical shipment of materials that involves a trip on a ferry. The ferry runs on the hour between 7am and 9pm.
If the shipment arrives at the dock after 9PM the trip will delay until 7AM the next morning.
If the shipment arrives after the top of the hour during sailing hours, it will need to wait until the next sailing (i.e., if the truck arrives at 7:20 AM the next sailing is at 8AM.
I have tried to schedule Resource working times each hour for one minute and it works, but I only seem to be able to add five of these entries at most (7am – 11am). Is there a way to somehow get Project to handle the ferry schedule?
I have never come acrossb this limit in my own schedules, but it does seem to be a hard limit. Generally I do not recommend MS Project for hourly schedules.
The best recommendation I can offer is either to create several “ferry” resources, each with five deliveries. Three resources (AM, Midday and PM for example), or use a different tool to resolve this scheduling problem.
I hope you can help. I am using Project 2007 (although my colleague tested this in 2010 with same results. I have resources on the Standard Calendar. When I update their working times to work on an occasional weekend, Project will apply the new schedule to tasks that are already in the Project for that resource. But if I add a new task, assign that resource and pick the weekend day, I get the message that this is not a working day and would I like to make it a working day or make it the next business day. Is there an additional step I need to take
Thank you,
Karen
I have not seen that particular problem. It may be due to the order in which you made the updates. If you enter a task and there are no resources assigned, then it is scheduled based upon the project-level calendar. If you want to make a particular weekend day a working day for everyone on the project, I recommend updating the project calendar as well as the resources’ calendars. Once you assign a resource to the task, then the resource’s calendar should take over.
Hi,
I am using MS Project Server 2010. The organization where i work is 24/7 with three shifts (8 hours each). I was using Project Professional 2007 before and there i had the option of 24-Hours in the built-in base calendar. Now in Project SERVER 2010 there is no option of 24-Hours, it just has a standard calendar in it, in the calendar. What do i have to do for that. Do i have to create three separate calendar for every shift….need your help.
Thanks,
Fodi
You can create your own custom 24-hour calendar in MS Project 2010 using the instructions in the article above. The “calendar” options have not changed significantly from 2007 to 2010 — just the default 24/7 calendar is gone.
If you want to coordinate shift-work using MS Project, you definitely can create separate calendars for each shift. There are pros and cons to creating shifts in MS Project. The advantage is that you will get more accurate estimates of exactly when work will be performed. If you assign work to someone on the night shift, for instance, MS Project will automatically schedule it for their next shift and will place it on the appropriate day of the week.
The disadvantage of entering multiple shifts in MS Project is that MS Project will then become more strict in its scheduling rules. If you assign a task to someone on night-shift AND day-shift, you may cause MS Project to look for a time where BOTH people are on at the same time, and cause a scheduling problem. You can workaround this by allowing the two assignees to work the same task at different times, but it is worth playing with both a 24/7 calendar and a three-shift setup before deciding which approach works best for your work environment.
Let me know if this suggestion helps. I hope you are able to accurately model your real-life scheduling problem using MS Project. Personally, I am using MS Project less often now, and have not made the upgrade to 2010 because I do not see significant advantages over MS Project 2007. RiskyProject is now my scheduling tool of choice.
–Alex
Thanks Alex for your quick response.
I have tried the both and there is some thing i want to share, may be i am doing some thing worng or may be thats how it works. I created three calendars and than i assign the calendar to my resources according to their shifts i.e Morning, evening and night, and than i assign these resources to a task. When i assign a morning and an evening resource to a single task of say 3 days duration, it automatically changes the duration to 6 days but at the same time it is not changing the start and end date of the task, only duration is changed. Is this how it works? What i had assumed was that by giving more resources will reduce the duration of the work, atleast not increase it. If i assign morning, evening and night resource to a 3 day task it changes the duration to 9 days. Its pretty confusing. Can you help me with this please.
Thanks
FODI
This client company demands a strange resource engagement. They run on a T&M mode i.e. most of the time in the year the resources are going to work in shared service mode. E.g. resource 1 works on a task, and if there is another task comes which is having higher priority, the resource need to move to the new task. So, I wanted to define, a resource is assigned to the potential higher priority task always, and whenever there is no work in that task, the resource can work on other pre-defined tasks. Bottom line, a resource will be assigned to one task (which is his primary) and other multiple tasks as secondary. Overall, I know the amount of effort required to complete these tasks. My dillema is, I would like to see all resources(row wise) in the same screen, and also all the high level tasks in different column wise, where I will allocate their allocation % among different tasks (either day wise, week wise, etc). Is it possible?
The “resource usage” view would meet your requirement nicely. It is ordered and grouped by resource, but you can expand it out to show all the tasks as well. It has a time-phased view, so you can see how many hours each resource is working in total or for an individual task in a given day, week, or month.
This does not exactly meet your requirement, because it does not put the tasks in columns, but instead as rows under each resource. You can directly edit the work-hours in the time-phased view, though, so I use it very often to allocate resources for known work. If I know that I want a resource to work 50/50 on a task for a given week, I put 20 hours on one task and 20 hours on the other. The resource usage view shows me that the person has a total of 40 hours of work for the week, as well as the breakdown by task.
Let me know if this helps!
Alex,
I’m having a problem getting MS Project to configure the resource calendars properly for my project. This organization runs 24/7, with two shifts: one running 6 am to 6 pm, the other 6 pm to 6 am. I can set the first shift calendar to 6 am to 6 pm, but MSP won’t let me set the working time properly for the second shift, 6 pm to 6 am. I’ve tried changing the start and finish times in various ways, i.e. 6:01 am to 5:59 pm, 6 am to 5:59 pm, etc, but MSP keeps automatically changing the start/finish times for shift two to something like 7 am to 8 am, etc.!?
I’m not sure if this is relevant, but the other complication is that each shift operates four days on and four off, repeatedly throughout the year. So for each shift, I am also customizing (using Details) the working time and non-working time to reflect this pattern.
Can you tell me how to get the proper start and finish times aligned between the two shifts’ calendars?
Thanks so much,
Reid Jenner
Is there a way to tie some selected tasks to your Outlook Calendar? Or have some way to trigger that there is a specific event to your attention?
I do not recommend trying to tie an Outlook Calendar to your task list in MS Project. In my view, personal calendaring and project management really demand different levels of “task management”.
You could create a script to import a task list into Outlook using Visual Basic or any other scripting language. As far as I am aware, there is no “built in” function to easily import the tasks. If anyone else has a recommendation, please post it for Scott.
–Al
The second shift will need to be entered as 6 pm until 12 midnight, then 12 midnight to 6 am. You are probably running into the problem because of the way it breaks over the midnight time. I have run into this problem running international projects as well. Because of the odd cycle of your shifts, you might find it hard to schedule a consistent, repeating calendar. You may want to consider simply ignoring the two-shift issue, and tracking the shift 1/shift 2 work some other way.
I hope the suggestion helps! Let us know what finally worked for you.
–Al
Hi,
2 shift s per day problem in MS Project 2010, please help.
I have a project with 2 shifts per day.
First shift start at 06:00 ends 18:00.
Second shift Start at 18:00 ends at 06:00.
How can I set this up, I have tried but project just change my hours automatically.
Any help would be appreciated.
I have tried your suggestion (33) but still not working. I never had this problem with Primavera.
I am sorry that the solution did not work. You may want to simply ignore the two-shift aspect to the schedule. It should work to define one shift as 6:00 to 18:00, then another working calendar (shift 2) as 18:00 to 23:59 and 00:00 to 6:00. If that does not work for you, I am not sure what to recommend.
Primavera definitely has some advantages over MS Project. Personally I am using Risky Project for most of my scheduling now, and have given up on MS Project. I no longer teach MS Project actively, and have no plans to upgrade to MS Project 2010 because of my many frustrations with the tool. I hope these articles are still helpful to people, and I do my best to help people as I can, but I cannot address all the problems with the latest version since I do not own it myself.
Good luck!
My organization is using Project 2007. We’d like to have a default company calendar we all can use. Is there a way to do that without having to type in all the dates for each new project?
Alex,
You tips on solving real life calendar issues are very helpful. To account for non-project time such as meetings and vacations of a resource, I wonder if you know any tools that can automatically extract the non-project time out of a personal calendar to be input into Microsoft Project.
Thank you,
Yah
I have heard of many people asking for this feature, and I do not know of any software that provides that feature. It should be possible to do via scripts, since MS Project is an automation client. Writing a script like that would require some programming skill. I would recommend talking to an MS Office programmer if you are serious about getting that feature at your work place.
–Al Brown
Yes, Amy. There are a few ways to have a company calendar shared among multiple projects.
The simplest method is to create a template MPP file. Enter the company calendar into that template, and direct all your project managers to use that template when starting a new project. This method is the one I prefer. I set up default settings for units, views, and other features along with the corporate calendar. If there are all in the template, then everyone automatically shares them.
It is also possible to create a company calendar in a sample MPP file, and have each project manager use the “Organizer” to copy the calendar into their own projects. This method requires a little more skill on the part of each project manager. You can search the help for more information about the Organizer and how to copy a calendar between projects.
Finally, you can create a “resource pool” MPP file, and direct all your project managers to import their resources from the resource pool. If the resources use a common corporate calendar in the resource pool, then all projects linked to the resource pool will share the corporate calendar. This method requires some discipline and set-up, but is the most resilient of the methods I have listed. If your corporate calendar changes in the future, you can update the “resource pool” MPP file and every project manager gets the update the next time they open their project file.
Of course, a Project Server installation will also solve this problem, but I am assuming that you are using a desktop version of MS Project.