Hi: I have to jump in here and say, there other reasons why you might want to have only person assigned to each task: Sometimes the task might be worked on by a mix of employees and contractors - we capitalize the contractor work, and rarely the employee work, so one task will model the assignments to capitalizable people (Contractors) and another task will model the assignment to non-capitalizable people (employees); Sometimes we have a task that (I’m making this up) will take ten weeks. One person is going to work the first three weeks only. Another person works all ten weeks. Another person works the last three weeks. We would create three tasks to model each person’s activity on that overall task. We don’t allow timesheet buckets - that is a task with 10 people assigned to it and 800 planned hours. That isn’t planning and doesn’t tell you anything meaningful. Shaz-bot is about all the cursing that is necessary, in my opinion ☺ There are good reasons to break work up a little finer. Before you complain about having a project plan that is 20% larger because you’ve had to break out certain tasks, let me tell you horror stories of how other PM tools do it. There is one out there that gives you the ability to open the task resource assignments, and describe myriad combinations of planned hours, days, assignment curves, and other complex ways of representing people’s work on tasks. That introduces a whole layer of complexity (and versatility) that is really difficult to manage. Yeah, I’ve used those packages, but I think the simple approach - creating new tasks to model the ways people work on a task - is the easiest to understand and easiest to maintain. WorkFront will soon release (I forget what they call it) resource planned hours shaping. They will let you describe how to distribute the planned hours for a resource across the duration. You can say 20% this week, 10% next week, 5% next week, and so on. For many, this will prove to be a time hole - you will keep dumping time into getting the distribution of hours just exactly the way you want it. I say resist the urge to introduce higher and higher degrees of complexity in your project plan. Shaping the distribution of hours on a task is a great tool for a very small set of conditions, but a horrible nightmare to maintain if you use it a lot on your projects. Anyway, I digress. I’m done now, thanks for raising the topic! Eric
