When planning a project, in which field should I put the amount of work required for a task? In other words if building a wall takes 10 man-days, where do I put this 10?



I have so far been putting it in the Duration column, but every time I update the project, MSP modifies the Duration column to reflect the new duration of the project, including delays etc. This loses track of the original duration, so this can't be right.

What does Duration mean? The number of planned elapsed days (including holidays and non-working days, or not?), the number of planned man-days, the number of actual elapsed days so far, or the number of actual man-days so far, or what?

And when updating the project, where do I put the actual % complete of each task at this moment in time? I have so far been using the % Complete column (seems logical, right?) but I'm not sure this is right, because MSP is sometimes preventing me from updating this field.

Thanks - Rowan

There are 2 separate items here. Duration is the time a task will take to complete- if you have a duration of 10 days, and achieve 50% of the task after 10 days, you still have 50% (5 days) of duration left. When project updates from % complete, it looks at the duration -this can change depending on setings but is usually the most useful way to update.

When you put a task into project it uses the calender assigned to it (5 day working by default), so a 10 day task will span weekends (non working time) but the duration will still be 10 days, so no, holidays and weekends are not included, although they will affect the start/ finish dates.

The amount of work (or effort) is effectively ( in your example) the number of man daysinvolved in a task. If you have a task that requires 10 man days of work, and assign 1 man to it, then both the effort and duration will be 10. If you assign 2 men to it, the effort will stay at 10 (as it still takes 10 man days to complete) but the duration will reduce to 5 (2 men).
For a programme where resources are not assigned, the effort and duration will be the same (as it assumes only 1 unit assigned), but you can assign more units to a task, which will reduce the duration.

For updating, yes, % complete is usually correct. In my line of work (construction) tasks almost never take as long as programmed, due to 101 different factors, and % complete allows you to show actual progress in a meaningful way. While it may knock dates out of line, it lets you see the what and when and take appropriate action.
This often means that your finish day moves like a yoyo, but thats part and parcel of being a planner