As a project manager, it is your job to ensure that all your tasks are scheduled for the right time, especially making sure that no tasks are scheduled on days when your workers aren’t available. Before even starting work, you need to set the working hours & days that are required to complete the task.
Project for the web comes with a default work template that can be automatically applied to all projects. This template is based on the average work schedule: it specifies work hours of 9AM through 5PM from Monday through Friday. If your work does not follow this schedule, you can create a new work template to suit your project’s needs.
A Work Hours Template is a template that defines working days & hours and can later be applied to a project or resource. If you need more information about how to change the calendar on your project, you can check out our blog post on changing your project’s hours here.
However, for a lot of organizations, the schedules of the workers (or resources) don’t always match the schedule of the overall project. For example, you may have an office that is open Monday – Friday, 9AM-5PM, but have part time workers that only work Monday-Wednesday, 9AM-3PM. You want to ensure that the tasks assigned to these workers are scheduled for times when your workers are available. This blog post will walk you through how to set the calendar of a resource & how resource calendars collide with project calendars in Project for the web.
Setting a Resource’s Calendar
Project for the web is built on the Microsoft Power Platform. Because of this, some aspects of calendar set up needs to be done in Power Apps.
To access this experience:
- While signed into your M365 account, open a browser window & go into https://web.powerapps.com
- On the Power Apps page, select Apps.
- On the Apps page, in the Org Apps tab, select Project.
Once you’ve opened this experience, you’ll need to go into the Resources tab to see all the available resources.
From here, select the resource whose calendar you need to edit. In this example, we’ll edit Diego’s calendar.
Once you’ve selected the resource, you will see the General & Work Hours tabs. By selecting the Work Hours tab, you will see the current set work hours on that resource.
From here, there are a few options to change the resource’s working hours:
- Use the New button to create a new set of rules for your resource’s calendar
- Edit the existing rules on your resource’s calendar.
Creating New Calendar Rules
There are three types of new rules that you can create:
- Working hours ~ A Working hours rule defines hours during which your resource will be working.
- Non-working ~ A Non-working rule defines times during which your resource is normally not working.
- Time off ~ A Time off rule defines times during which your resource may usually be working, but is taking time off & thus not working.
We recommend that you only use Working hours rules when editing your resource’s calendars.
Editing Existing Calendar Rules
You can edit an existing rule by clicking on the rule on your resource’s calendar. You can edit the individual event, all events going forward, or all events.
Once you select the rule you wish to edit, a side panel will open with options to edit the hours.
You can edit your calendar rules in this pane. Once you are done editing the rule, click ‘Save’.
Once you have finished setting your resource’s calendar, click ‘Save’ to ensure the calendar is saved.
And you’re done! Your resource’s calendar is set & saved, ready to use.
Resource & Project Calendars
Once you’ve set the calendar for your project & your resource, you’re ready to start creating tasks in your project! This section will show you how scheduling works if your resource & project calendars don’t match up and will give you some helpful tips & tricks for scheduling your tasks.
For this example, let’s assume that we have a project with working days Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM, with our resource (Diego) working Monday-Wednesday, 9AM-5PM.
As the PM, I’ve created our new project, Event Planning, and planned a few tasks out. I’m now ready to start assigning these tasks to my workers!
As you can see, these tasks have not been assigned to anyone yet.
Let’s take the Research potential locations task. This task has a 5 day duration, starting on a Monday & ending on a Friday.
I’ll assign Diego to this task.
After assigning Diego to this task, the task is rescheduled for 7 days of duration, starting on Monday & now ending the following Tuesday. Why did this happen?
Due to Diego’s calendar, he can’t work the last two days during which this task is scheduled (Thursday & Friday). This means that he will have 0 working hours for that task on those days. This ‘missed’ work forced Project to extend the task 2 more days, so Diego can do the work during his working time.
But, if Diego isn’t working on Thursday & Friday, why is that included in the duration?
Duration is the number of project working days between the start & finish dates of the task. While Diego isn’t working on those days, those are working days for the project, thus they are included in the duration calculation.
However, when I open the Task Details pane, I can see that Diego has 40 hours of effort on this task, proving that he is still doing the original expected amount of work on this task.
And there you have it! Project recalculates your tasks to ensure that your workers are only working on days that they are available to work & are included in your project’s calendar.
Do you have other questions about scheduling? Let us know what you would like to see in the next blog post below. You can also always leave us feedback on the Project Feedback Portal.
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