Q&A: “How can I accommodate resources working different hours per day on the same activity?
Written on . By CPM Solutions
The Primavera P6 Project Manager software uses the Admin setting for hours/day, hours/week, hours/month, hours/year to convert all units and duration type fields from the internally stored hours to the user’s display format preference of hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Internally-stored hours are always stored as hours in the database. In most cases, the Project Manager does not have a calendar to convert between these display formats, i.e. when there are multiple resources on an activity, or when Project Manager summarizes data at any level above resource assignments. It is important to use a consistent conversion factor between these display formats. To accommodate resources working various hours per day, you can setup assignments similar to the following example. Global Time Period is set to 8 hours per day.
- Set the Activity Type to Resource Dependent.
- Set the Activity Duration Type to Fixed Duration and UPT.
- Assign standard calendar (i.e. 5 Day 8 Hour) to the activity.
- Assign different resource calendars (i.e., 5 Day 6 Hours, or 5 Day 7 Hours, etc.) to each resource. The Units/Time for each resource should be 100% (or 8 h/d)
- During the planning, set the activity duration (NOT the Resource Assignment Duration) to the number of days you want and the assignments’ duration and units will be calculated correctly based on each individual resource calendar.
In this example, the activity has “5 day 8 hour” calendar, one resource has “5 day 6 hour” calendar, another resource has “5 day 7 hour” calendar and the last resource has “5 day 8 hour” calendar. When setting the activity duration to 5 days, each assignment’s duration and units are computed correctly according the each resource’s calendar.