In order to determine whether or not a day is a work day, and how much work a team member can perform, the task duration or timeframe must be known. If you enter a start and an end date for the task, you could assume that the duration of the task constitutes the number of days between those dates. However, if the team member does not work one of those days, or if one of the days is a half day, then the duration would be less than the number of days between those dates.
If the start date of the task changes, then the duration of the task would need to be compared against the following new dates after the start date. For example, if a 5 day task starts on Monday, in a full work week schedule, it would end on Friday at the end of the day and last team member is 50% allocated he would work 20 hours.
If you wanted the task to have fixed work of 40 hours and you recalculated the resource assigned to that task to be 50% allocated, or they worked half days that week, then the task would take until the following Friday, but the duration is still 5 days, since a day is 8 hours. Now if the same 40 hour, 5 day task at 100% allocation started on Tuesday it would end on the following Monday at the end of the day. The task would then elapse 7 days instead of 5 calendar days when it started on Monday. The bottom line is that if the schedule is not being calculated with intelligent scheduling, you can get a resource allocation report, but you would have to manually update all the dates of all the tasks for any kind of shift in the schedule.
With intelligent scheduling, Project Insight calculates all the dates for you based on the 'Work' and 'Duration' of the task, rather than on the dates you think it should be done by. Tasks are normally driven by work, not by dates. Dates are a result of the calculation of the duration and work. You can adjust how much work a person works over a duration of time by using resource allocation, or you can calculate the resource allocation based on the work and duration in Project Insight. The scheduled dates are a by-product of those constraints, as well as external task constraints such as predecessors and fixed date constraints. All of these are important factors in a schedule and provide great benefit to the planner and executer of a project schedule.
When you are shopping for project management software solutions, make sure that your choice has intelligent scheduling.
Cynthia West
Vice President, Project Insight