Hi,

I need to do some capacity planning for one of the departments in our factory and, in the absence of anything bespoke, am trying to use MS Project but without any training.

At present I have set up the various workers as resources and also used the "Change working time" tab so that the default calender is the same as the normal hours we work.

I then assigned tasks (jobs) to the various resources (people) which results in a Gantt Chart showing when the jobs should be statrted to ensure we meet the customers requirements.

Trouble is I then wanted to allow for peoples holidays and to do this I went into the "Change working time" tab and scrolled down to the person (resource) concerned and edited the calendar so that their holiday was "Non Working Time".

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to have any effect on the Gantt chart which remains the same and doesnt show the task taking more weeks to complete.

What am I doing wrong?

John.

hi,

that all sounds good to me.

the people that have booked holidays are they working on tasks on the critical path? i.e. is there slack in your processes so that is hiding holidays?


Blake

split the task is the easiest way - you have to do it on the specific task that needs the holiday inserting. Its a bit of a work around but will get you what you need for a few one offs like holidays.

hi,

you real should not split the task as what happens when if you apply different resource to the task? or have 2 people working on a task?

bake

At the moment I've opted for splitting the task thus, in effect, manually introducing a holiday.

However, I'm beginning to wonder if I started in the right way.

What I'm trying to achieve is a plan for a small department with various people working on different jobs, some of which may have interdependencies but others are totally discrete (appart from the fact that all tasks have to be achieved by the same group of individuals).

Should I really create a seperate project for each job and then combine them in some way so that the possible completion dates take into account the fact that resources are also being used on other jobs (projects)?

What made me query this was the question about tasks being on the Critical Path because with totally unrealted tasks each with different delivery date requirements there's not a Critical Path across the whole project as such (well, as far as I can see anyway!).

There are 2 ways that Project calculates the project schedule, task based or resource based. You need to select resource driven, by the sound of it

I agree with JohnN - what you've doe is tell the programme that a task takes a certain duration to complete and allocated resource.

If you make it resource driven, the labour defecit should show in the programme.