Your Take: Fixed Duration Tasks in Project 2007

[ssanderlin]

This thread is for discussions stemming from the EPMFAQ Blog post entitled Fixed Duration Tasks in Project 2007.

I'm interested in knowing the impact of this change across the EPM Community. How has this change affected you, your projects, and your organization? In your plans, how were you using tasks with Duration but no Work? Let's discuss the reasons behind this use case so that we can come up with alternative ways of structuring projects in order to avoid this problem.

[Dave Giguere]

No matter how well a project is sequenced things change. Sometimes this change means accomplishing tasks out of sequence. It has been helpfull for fixed duration non work effort projects to roll up 0hrs to summary. I also get to enjoy watching the finish date pull back at the same time. Why make it more difficult then that. Have you tried to load Project 2007, fixed duration, non work effort project resource information and share it across Project 2000, 2003, and 2007 users. Morph is the only term that describes the results. Microsoft! If it's not broken don't fix it....

[philk]

My customer is an immature organisation just introducing project management and using a PPM tool to drive it. They create fixed duration tasks because they are managing the start and end dates without concerning themselves who is allocated to the tasks. In other words they manage time and not effort. This makes it impossible for them to use MSP. Open Workbench might be a better option !

[ssanderlin]

Originally Posted by philk

My customer is an immature organisation just introducing project management and using a PPM tool to drive it. They create fixed duration tasks because they are managing the start and end dates without concerning themselves who is allocated to the tasks. In other words they manage time and not effort. This makes it impossible for them to use MSP. Open Workbench might be a better option !

Frankly, I think that your customer is the pinnacle of the problem. This is why I would prefer, instead of simply changing it back and forth, Microsoft would make it a server option. That way, you could transition between the two at your customer's pace!

[lmccoy]

when scheduling development projects, i need the ability to create tasks for Business Unit testing. This will result in a duration task with no work effort involved. The true work effort is for Information Technology effort only in order for me to accurately reflect the amount of effort for actual development that may be billed to that Business Unit. I simply need a placeholder for their testing that does not affect my bottom line billable hours. So, Microsoft just removed my ability to accuratel reflect the billable work hours and still easily track a timeline for the project. i have to put 0.02 hours in the effort column and assign the business unit resource at 1% (or thereabouts). This sucks!