MS Project 2013 working time adjustion

Question

I hope you might be able to help me, or at least tell me, that MS Project 13 is not designed for what I want.

I have a project with some summary tasks and each has several subtasks. I want to manage the summary tasks by auto schedule and the subtasks by manual. No problem here. But when I create ressources, for example a person and add it to a summary task or subtask, it kinda ruins my premade date/dayamount/houramount settings. I get, why it does that. But is it possible to assign ressources to tasks (because later I want reports, who worked how much on which ressource), without ruining my premade settings.

For example:

summary a 90h 30d autos chedule subtask b 30h 10d manual schedule subtask c 30h 10d manual schedule subtask d 30h 10d manual schedule

If I add now a ressource, it will convert whether the hours and/or days depending on how that ressource works(how many hours in a week, in a day, ...) etc etc etc... I already tried playing with Working Time Adjustment, but well... I guess the core problem is, that I don't want core working hours.

If you need more specific examples, I should be able to provide them. Thx for everything.

Answer 1

In MS-Project tasks and resources have some key properties. In general usage Tasks are defined by the amount of work required to complete them. Resources come with a property that defines how many work hours they will do on the project (or task). By combining the two it is possible to work out how long a task will take to complete. And that is exactly what MS-Project does... So the behaviour you are talking about is fundamental to the way the product works, which perhaps means it is not suited to your task.

Would I be right in saying that the information you need is about tracking, after the event, how much work a resource has spent on the tasks? If this is the case you need a different tool, more akin to time tracking. You could set it up so that all resources work 24h per day and then continually update the "Work" column to match what is spent as it is spent (after defining the project to define Work in hours instead of days) but scheduling of tasks in time would be nonsensical. Or to go one step further, just track the hours spent against a task in the work column and don't bother assigning resources at all, since you are not scheduling against core hours!