Resourcing: Start On and Due On on same date, still visible in resource overviews?

[LoesVa]

Hi, I'm a resourcing manager within a marketing department. We've been Project Managing in WF for about 3,5 months now but only started using the resourcing piece of it very recently. The pilot started 2 weeks ago, so I'm still learning. We create schedule templates (tasks) which have a pre-set duration and planned hours. They also contain roles & predecessors and calculate automatically from Planned Completion Date (default project setting). This is working quite well for us, but for one thing: when we want a task to start and complete on the same day. Entering 1 day duration automatically lifts the due on date to the next day, which unnecessarily extends our schedule. Example: 1 Days, 4 hours leads to Start on: 10/07/17, Due on 11/07/17. As we The intuitive thing to do is to enter 0 (zero) in Duration, and indeed the schedule then puts Start On and Due On on the same day. Perfect. Until you check your resources: as soon as a task contains Duration 0 it no longer appears in the Resource Grid / User Allocation / User Staffing overviews. Even if the task has 8 hours allocated to this. This means that the 0 Duration approach is pointless from a resourcing perspective. Does anyone have experience with how to plan hours on 1 date and it still being taken into account for resource allocation? I'd love to find a fix for this... Thanks!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Loes, I can think of a few options to help you plan in days (eg "1 day") without having tasks roll over to the next day...although none are perfect. First, some theory to explain why this usually happens: I set a sensible Hours Worked Per Day (eg 8 hours) as a global Setting I set a sensibleDefault Schedule (eg Mon-Fri 8 hours per day) I create a sensible Template attached to that schedule with day-based durations (eg Task 1 "1 Day", Task 2 "1 Day", etc.) I create a Project that uses that Template and choose a start date for the Project (eg next Wed), BUT neglect to override time component to align with my Schedule (eg perhaps it is currently 11am on Monday, and the default time component then says next Wed at 11am) Once I save the Project, I see that all my 1 Day Tasks are "rolling over" to finish the next day (eg Task 1 from Wed 11am to Thurs 11 am, etc.) Worse, as I inject new Tasks (eg Task 2b, dependant on Task 2, with "1 Day" duration), that rollover effect perpetuates To avoid the rollover effect, I would consider: Sharing this information with Project Managers and asking them to be careful to plan their Start Dates "to the hour" (eg next Wed at 8am), and adjust any current Projects accordingly Creating a calculated Parameter and/or a View that highlights any exceptions so they can be corrected Adjusting the default Schedule to allow more time in a day to complete Tasks (eg 8am - midnight, or even 24x7)....but accepting that this would skew my resource planning Adjusting the Hours Worked Per Day global setting..,but with the same reservations I suggest that an ounce of Education in the forme two is worth a pound of Workarounds in the latter second two. Regards, Doug

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Loes, The 1 Day duration is based on the Typical Hours Per Day field in your settings. So if you say 8 hours, 1 Day equals 8 hours. This means if your schedule has 7 hours, a task that is 1 day will carry over to the next day. To make things easier for us, we make sure all schedules have 8 hours just to make sure they make the duration amount. The second thing you should look at (which I tell my project managers all the time) is to make sure that the start time of your project is 9am (Or whatever your start time is for your company.) This is very important if you have offices and business units in a different time zone than your system default. If someone's schedule starts at 10am and the first task is ASAP, the first task starts at 10am. So a 1 day duration is 10am on the 10th to 10am on the 11th. If you move that time to 9am, the task will be 9am on the 10th to 5pm on the 10th. Also note, if a PM does a half day duration and then does a 1 day duration (I only like to use 1 day durations but some of my PMs get very picky with their durations), the 1 day will expand across two days as it is 1pm on the 10th to 1pm on the 11th. Hope this is helpful.

[LoesVa]

Thanks for the explanation Doug! It's brought my attention to the importance of project schedules, as we do schedule work in different time zones. I have another challenge though; quite a few of my resources are not 1 full FTE. After consulting with Workfront I was informed that simply filling in the FTE value in the user profile does not reflect the lower available hours in resourcing. The advice was to apply schedules reflecting the actual working hours on user level, which we have done. Let's take 1 user as an example: user works 80% FTE. Schedule applied is Mo-Fri 10:30-17:00 RST (Amsterdam), no exceptions. I set up a task on Calculated Assignment, 1d2h, Task Constraint As Soon As Possible. Project schedule = local time zone, 9:00-17:00. Assigned job role is 'Marketing Project Manager'. Planned Start Date automaticlly starts at 9:00. Task schedules on 1 calendar day. Perfect. I replace 'Marketing Project Manager' with abovementioned user. The task is now set to start on day 1 at 12:30, set to finish on day 2 at 15:30. There is no time off / other work scheduled for this user on either dates. If I allocate a user with 1 FTE this doesn't happen. This doesn't make any sense to me; with sufficient free time within the user's schedule on day 1 and a duration of only 2h, why would the system carry over the task to the next day? I would expect the task to schedule to start on day 1 at 9:00 and finish at day 1 at 11:00. Am I missing something crucial here?! Thank you, Loes

[LoesVa]

Thanks for the explanation Anthony! It did explain some of it, but I still have some further questions, which I posted as reply on Doug's answer. I'd really appreciate it if you could also have a look at it :) Thanks again!

[AnthonyIm]

Hi Loes - Being honest, we don't touch schedules. Every user and project from an office has the same schedule. They are all 9-5 and we use the exceptions to block off holidays. We found it gets too complicated otherwise. We do use different FTE's though. This makes people appear red in the resource grids sooner. So if someone is only 0.5 FTE, they will become overallocated at 20 hours and the resource manager can go in an adjust their workload.