THIS!!!! I have never found a PPM program that allows for handling this well. Ideally, what would be great would be for Workfront to allow for dual constraints. That way you could make the START DATE of the task Start-to-Start with the Start of the project AND END DATE of the task Finish-to-Finish with the End of the project. That way, as those dates change, this task would change elastically. Also, it would be great if you could put in a fixed hours-per-week number. So, you say that no matter what, this task should have 2 hours per week. If the task ends up being five weeks, it has 10 hours of effort. If the end date shifts 2 weeks out, then it automatically increases to 14 hours of effort. This feature is my dream feature!!! But, it doesn't exist and no PPM product is interested in creating a task feature that MS Project doesn't already have, so it will never happen... Typically, our projects have at least 2 tasks like this. One is an Admin task for Project Managers to record their hours. A general catch-all task that we can put hours for running project meetings, updating status reports, scheduling things, responding to e-mails, etc. We also have a similar task for the project team members for attending the weekly status meetings. These tasks are set up as a successors to the Kick-off (this has it's own task, so people record their time to that specifically) as weekly meetings tend to start after the kick-off. Then, as the project goes on, I have to manually adjust the hours of effort (which is typically (Number of team members) x (duration in weeks) x (estimated effort per week - typically 1/2 hour or hour)) and duration as the project changes over time. Since this is manual it ends up being frequently too long or too short for at least some period of time before I remember they need adjusted to reflect schedule changes. Jason Maust McGuireWoods LLP
