Durations of Days don't seem to calculate correctly

Hi Adam, My guess is it's related to your Schedule. For example, if you have a schedule that's showing 10 hour days (instead of 8). The trick might be finding which schedule it's using (i.e. it could be at the project level or it could be the user). I would check the Project first. Go to Edit Project > Settings > Schedule and see what schedule you have in there. Then look at that schedule under Setup and see how your days are allocated.

Our schedule was set to 9.5 hour days, which we would like to keep, but I can see that this would add up to 38 hours over 4 days, so it must be rounding off the 5th. I also found that our typical work day was set to 7.5 hours. A combination of these seems to impact the day duration. Leaving the 9.5 hour days but upping the typical work day to 8.5 solved for this, or lowering the length of a day Adam Green Taylor Digital

Hi Adam, Weeeeeellllll. Sort of. I guess it depends on what you use your schedule for. You can go to Setup > Project Preferences > Projects and change Typical Hours per Day. Then in the Project don't select a schedule and it'll default to this. But the behavior is the same as if you used a schedule with these same settings. You can set this to 8 hours and not touch your schedules. Not sure if that helps, but it's an option. I'll let someone else chime in if they use a 9.5 or 10 hour schedule. For us, we use 8 hours in the schedule and the days line up appropriately. If people spend 10 hours in a day, they just log it in their Actuals. If I estimate they're going to spend 10 hours a day for a week, I just put 50 hours in the Planned Hours to calculate the estimated cost (but it doesn't impact the timeline). Basically, you're telling the tool what you want a Day to represent. In MS Project you would enter the Hours of Effort (i.e. Planned Hours) and it would do the Duration calculation for you (in this very same way – depending on how you define a "day" in the schedule). In WF it's thinking the same way, but it's using Duration instead to do the same thing. It's thinking about it in terms of effort. So it equates 1 day to whatever you define in the schedule. WF ignores the Planned Hours in regards to timeline. Even if you set that Task Duration Type to Effort Driven, it's going to change your Planned Hours to coincide with your schedule and duration (as opposed to calculating your Duration). What is the drawback to setting the schedule to 8 hours a day?

Make sure your start times are equal to that of your system start times. This was squirrelly for me too until I changed my view to show Panned Start and completion dates with time of day. I start them at 9am and end at 5pm. If the time is less than that, it will effect the duration. Crazy right. Wish I could have every template and task entered automatically start at 9am – 5pm BUT I have to manually change this when converting a request to a project. Hope that helps. Samantha Senior Specialist, Creative Services 817-424-2186

Our team is encountering the same issue. We need to adjust our working hours to be 9 hours instead of 8. We are trying to figure out the best approach without it impacting the 150+ projects we have in flight. Any suggestions to minimize reworking all active schedules? Thanks! -Kiersten Kiersten Kollins DSW Inc.

Kiersten, I would make a new schedule and use that schedule on all new projects...you can make the new schedule the default and it won't change the schedule that is currently on projects. If you change the current schedule used on projects you will see the dates change on all those projects which won't be a good thing! Let me know if you have other questions about this. Thanks! David
DAVID A. TAYLOR Founder & Managing Consultant

Yeah, David's on top of it. I was about to say the same exact thing.

Thank you David and Vic!