Saturday, August 4, 2012

Scheduling non-humans in project 2010

So I was helping someone muddle through making a Project plan and ran into scheduling fun.  Some human performed tasks had to be scheduled with Predecessors that were computer days.  The humans only work monday-friday as opposed to the computers which ran 7 days a week.  I found several articles online that showed how to make a copy of the Standard calendar and they all said to change the days to include the weekends.  This seemed to work until we got a dozen or so entries into the plan and then it tried to schedule a Finish task on the same day as a Start for the same computer resource.  After fumbling around for a bit I figured out how to change the Display from just Date to Date and Time (00/00/00 00:00am/pm) and I noticed some odd start/stop times.  Ultimately the issue was that the Standard calendar Work week has the time defined as 08:00 to Noon and 13:00 to 17:00.  My cloned calendar had just been set to 08:00 to 17:00 which Project treated as a 9 hour work day and applied 8 hours of work which left a remainder.  So yes, now my computers get a lunch hour too and all is well.