Effort Driven in MS Project 2010
So you have got your tasks or entered into a project file and linked together in a sensible and realistic manner. Now you start to add your resources and the fun really begins!
Project allows you to command many complex calculations with regards to work effort, task duration, and assignment units for each resource. Depending on your settings and option called effort driven may be set to active for some of your tasks.
This assume that you have Effort-driven turned on. As you add resources to a particular task, project will distribute this work equally among each resource. As it does so the task duration may change in response to the total resource effort and depending upon the chosen task type.
To remind you, the default task type is fixed units where if you increase the task duration your resources will continue to carry out the work at the assigned units. In short, fixed units will not recalculate even when changes are made to the task duration or its work effort.
In a similar way, if your task is a fixed duration type, then the duration will not change even if you modify the work effort or assigned resource units.
The third type is fixed work, and as you would imagine the work field will not recalculate even though you may change the task duration of the resource units.
For both the fixed units and fixed duration task types, the effort driven check box is turned off although you can choose to turn it on if you wish. If you have selected the fixed work task type, then effort driven is permanently turned on and cannot be turned off.
The simplest way to change the settings for an effort driven task is to double click on the task name so that the task information dialog box appears. Select the advanced tab, and by the select all the select the effort driven check box.
Another relevant setting in the advanced tab is the check box called ‘scheduling ignores resource calendars’, and this also affects how resources are scheduled when they are assigned to a task.
Here, you can tell project to allow the task calendar to overwrite any resource calendars settings for the assigned resources; this will force the assigned resources to follow the assigned task calendar rather than their own.
Click the OK button to save your settings.
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