How is a project different from day to day work
Microsoft Project Tutorial - Work vs Duration
project TM a Microsoft Project training
and consulting services
australia-wide this quick video is
designed to address confusion that a lot
of people have about work and duration
often they mistake them for the same
thing before we get started we really
need to define three terms duration span
and work duration is our best guesses to
the number of working days it should
take to form our task span is the number
of calendar days that it should take to
perform the task and if we set a project
correctly and linked all of our tasks
and taking care of the calendars project
will calculate this on its own work is
the amount of time or effort expended by
a resource while performing a task an
important distinction here is that work
is not the same as duration in this
example we're going to use the standard
calendar and we're not going to modify
the working times during the day it's an
eight-hour day it goes from 8 a.m. till
5 p.m. with a 1 hour break between 12:00
and 1:00 o'clock in the afternoon so all
in all an eight-hour day here we have 5
day tasks called
perform research it begins on Monday and
finishes on Friday so it has a duration
of 5 days but in addition to that it has
a span of 5 calendar days the same
Monday through Friday we've moved the
start date of the same task to the 4th
of December and as you can see it now
begins on Wednesday and finishes at the
end of Tuesday the following week so
while it has a duration still 5 days it
now has a span of 7 calendar days note
that all we did here was change the
start date of the task from monday to
wednesday because we did that microsoft
project recalculated the span of the
but didn't change the duration so we
know the duration of the task is five
days but how much work has been assigned
to that task what we'll do is insert the
work column and check and see how much
work has been assigned as you can see no
work has been assigned to that task and
that's because there are no resources
assigned to that task and it's through
resource assignment that we add work to
tasks
I'll now assign a resource to that task
right clicking I'm going to the resource
sheet typing in the name of a resource
double-clicking that task selecting
resources selecting the name of the
resource pressing ok and we can see that
at the right hand side of the bar we
have the name of the resource and work
is now at 40 hours which is 8 hours a
day times the 5 days duration of the
task and that way we assign work to the
task in the example here we've removed
the resource again so you can see it's a
task of 5 days duration with no work
what a lot of people often tend to do
and it's incorrect is to say well we can
express duration in hours as well as
days and because work is mostly
expressed in hours they think that by
putting duration in in hours they're in
fact putting in work so what I'm going
to do is change the duration from five
days to 40 H 40 hours which is the same
period you can see that adding done that
it doesn't record any work as being
assigned to that task even though the
duration says 40 hours so always
remember duration is not tied to work
unless typically it's through a resource
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