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Microsoft Project 2010 Series: Session 2 : How to change working time and set holidays in Project 2010?

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Introduction - Microsoft Project 2010 Series Session 2 How to change working time and set holidays in Project 2010

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Techgig webinar series, our endeavor to empower techies, we believe that sharing of knowledge is the key to enhance our skills and grow us as professionals with this principle in mind we have initiated a series of webinars conducted by industry experts to give you all a crisp insight of various domains, the topic of today’s session is How to change working time and set holidays in project 2010 and this is session 2 in Microsoft project 2010 series being conducted by Mr. B. Sai Prasad.

Mr. B Sai Prasad, Senior Manager – Learning & Development, he has been with the service provider Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd since 2001 where he was named winner of the company's Global Trainer of the Year award.

He is a certified PMP, PMI-SP and Champion of Project Management, PMI India. Mr. Prasad is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in Project 2007 and Project 2010. He started the first Microsoft Project User Group India Chapter to promote and help practitioners within and outside India on Microsoft Office Project.

Without further delay I introduce you all to our guest speaker over to you Mr. Sai

Good evening all participants, I welcome you all for the session 2 of the project 2010 series.

Here we are going to talk about how to change the working             time and set holidays when we are preparing a schedule. The next slide is just to give you idea about what that had the first session where we understood what project 2010 is all about and what are the basic steps which you need to follow in order to build a forecast ready schedule.

Today I need to going to talk about calendar so let’s start with an anecdotes some of who does read the comic strip of Dilbert, so if you look at these 2 comic strips it’s really talks about the purpose of working time and how to manage it right otherwise we will ideally not be able to know the amount of hours each of the individual team members use to spend on your project also.

When we talk about schedule I remember we said schedule should be forecastable model right because when we say it’s a forecast able model it is ideally a smart simplification of a reality so that it gives us a predictive power in terms of understanding whether we are able to meet our project deadlines or not.

What is a Calendar?

Thinking is a same line the key take away of this 1 hour webinar is going to be what do we mean by calendars in project 2010. What are the different types of calendars and how that can be applied at different places when we prepare a dynamic schedule? Followed by we will talk about how to create and customize these calendars? How to set holidays and how to change the working time and finally we will conclude the webinar with how to share calendars what we have created to other project managers through MS project 2010.

What are the different types of calendars and how are they applied?

When we talk about calendar generally we talk about months, weeks, days and the holidays but when we talk about Microsoft project we also had another parameter associated which is also the working time so when we say calendars it is very important because it determines the working time of your activities on the resources because based on the working time that of the resources of the activities only the task start date and the task finish date is ideally calculated, so when we talk about Microsoft project we don’t talk about the monthly calendar or the yearly calendar rather we use 4 types of calendars within project 2010.

§  Base calendar

§  Project calendar

§  Resource calendar

§  Task calendar

Just remember these 4 calendars whenever you talk about calendars in project 2010 and please ensure that the calendars are remembered in the same order what is shown on this slide because project internally uses sequence in order to schedule your activities within your project 2010.

Let’s ready to simplify calendars in project 2010 1st, on your slide you are able to see I have use a term called project calendar and I have said something called standard when I say standard right, standard is one of the calendars provided by project 2010.

The standard calendar assumes that the working time is 8 to 12, 1 to 5 and any timing that is outside 8 to 5 is assumed to non working time. When we try to tie this standard calendar as the project calendar, so when you say project calendar project will assume that this is the standard or the default working time for your activities so when I try to connect my standard calendar as the project calendar and when I schedule an activity in my project so it will assume this order, so 5 hours of work will be ideally completed in 2 days, because I said at a project level the standard calendar is my project calendar so this will be my default calendar for scheduling this activity so let’s have a quick demo of it how it works.

I am just need to go back to my project 2010, I have not created any activity so if you look at ribbon called project you would be able to find there is a button called change working time so when you hit the change working time you would be able to see there are 3 calendars listed here, one called standard, one called nightshift, one called 24 hours. If you look at this standard calendar it gives you more on a monthly format and you can see the working time is 8 to 12, 1 to 5 whereas if you look at your nightshift calendar it is ideally I can say it is from Monday it is 11 pm to 12 and the next 3 day it is 12 to 3, 4 to 8 that’s you can say it’s more on night shift base calendar but when I look at 24 hours calendar you can see there are no days as holidays everyday is a working day.

As you can see there are 3 calendars that are generally provided one called standard, one called night shift, one called 24 hours. Now [Audio not clear] and I am just going to see my project calendar so the thing I am going to do is I am just going to go to the project information and this is the option which you need to (( )) it, you will be able to see there, there is a 2 fields called start date and finish date the start date here represent the start date of your project and the finish date will be disabled because we are going for a forward scheduling which means start date is entered whereas a finish date is going to be calculated by project 2010 for example if I say this is a project is going to start from 18th of September okay and I am just going to say it starts at 8 am and as a finish date is going to be dynamically calculated in these case.

The 2nd field which you need to focus here is this calendar as you can see this calendar comes under project which means this stands for the project calendar, I say my project calendar is going to be standard and I am just going to say okay in this case. What I am going to do now is I am just going to type an task name here let’s say prepare document I am going to say this activity is taking 5 days to complete and I am going to have another activity called review document and this is also going to take 5 days to complete and I am going to say the predecessors is 1, as you can see the movement I (( )) my relation automatically calculated, you might wonder how did project pick these dates from? So the first activity in your project is ideally assume that this activity should start when your project started so which is ideally 18th of September 8 am so you might wonder how is finish date of this project calculated.

For to understand this much better I suggested on your task ribbon you can find there is a button called inspect right, so when I say inspect it will try to help you to understand what are different factor that decides the start date of the task what I have selected on my screen let me click on inspect.

If you look at prepare document it is listed on your left hand side as prepared document it also tells you what are factors that is affecting this task, so these takes some time to go through the step [Not audible]. You are able to see the start date and finish date is calculated with respect to your project start date here now let me click on review, so if you look at review document it says factors affecting this the (( )) activity because (( )) should finish for the make the activity to start and also you are able to see the calendar that is used for scheduling your review is your project calendar that is standard so I am just going to go ahead and make another change now I am going to say on my project information that all my activities should not start as per my standard calendar which is 8 to 2 to 5 instead I just wanted to start as per my nightshift calendar.

Let me say okay, now I hope we are able to see the timing automatically changes it is 11 pm to 8 am and 11 pm to 8 am and you are able to see on your task inspector the project calendar is ideally used for scheduling your activities by default [Audio not clear]. Coming back to our slide as you can see the project calendar is the default calendar for scheduling your activities in your project, but remember project calendars is good for a high level planning but when you get into the details naturally you might want to assign a resource to the individual task. Remember each resources will go by as per different calendars one resource will work as per a standard and another resource will work as night shift or another resource will work as per different cities, in different countries right.

The 2nd scenario what I am going to demonstrate is let’s say you have said that the project calendar is standard when I say standard we are trying to assume that all my activities by default should work as per this standard calendar but I am saying my resources working only during the morning shift which means he works only during 8 to 12 and 1 to 5 he is not ideally working.

So I am just going to go back to my project, I am just going to type in a (( )) resource into my project so the way to do it is on my resource tab you can find that there is a button called team planner I am just going to select team planner and you can see there is a view called resource sheet, so I am just going to type a name of resource let’s say this is a name of resource I trying to type and I want to say this resource is working only 4 hours per day in the company okay.

The way I am going to do it is I am just going to click on that resource and I am going to go to the project ribbon and I am going to say change working time. So now you are able to find I am more looking at resource calendar of Sai currently if the resource is assumed to work as per night shift I am just going to say he is working as per standard calendar may be and I am just going to say from Monday to Friday his working time is not 8 to 12, 1 to 5 rather he works only 8 to 12 with respect to the company so the way to do it is I am just going to go to the work week, so you can see this working time is based on the default work week so I am going to go to the work weeks tab and I am just going to configure the working time here.

As you can see the week days that are listed as labels they are listed as row labels so I am just going to say Monday to Friday this resource will work on specific working time which is 8 to 12 only okay so movement I say             okay you are able to find now these resource Sai is working only 8 to 12 with respect to the company, but overall if you look at it you would like to task to be scheduled as per 8 to 12 and 1 to 5. We have changed our calendar now let me go back to my Gantt chart and I am just going to assign that resource to this particular task. 14:19

Let me bring my task inspector I hope we are now able to find this activity is scheduled as per your project start day and for next one if I am just going to say Sai you are able to find for a 2nd task review document the calendar is ideally used. Whenever you have a project calendar that will be used only for task that does not have any resource, but once you have assigned the resources to a particular task, the resource calendar will ideally we use for scheduling that particular activity.

Coming back to our slide, I said a project level I am using at a standard which is 8 to 5 but the resource available only from 8 to 12 so the project will try to do schedule the task to that resource as said, the 16 hours of work is now completed in 4 days okay because as per the resources calendar is available only from 4 hours every day in terms of this calendar.

Explain about the task calendar?

The next one is specific type of calendar which I want to talk about is called as the task calendar, here if you look at it I have just taken a scenario where the resources is working as per standard calendar which means the resource is working from 8 to 5, but you might want that specific task to be scheduled only during a working time.

Let me take an example here let me say activities to be done, the 3rd task what I have added on my screen was research activity you can find what the research activity I said it can start only (( )) documents in the reviewed, so currently look at these the research is scheduled as per your project calendar which is your night shift calendar.

I am just going to go back and change my project calendar to standard, you can see now my research scheduled as per my standard calendar, now let’s say you want ideally the resource to be only during the morning time which is only between 8 to 12, so the first step what I am going to do is I am going to say this task can be scheduled only during a specific working time, so the way to do it is 1st I will go to the change working time button of your project and I am going to create a new calendar now and the name of a calendar I am just going to say is research calendar.

I am going to say this calendar the working time is going to be only between 8 to 12 because I want the research be done only with that time, in this research calendar I am going to say Monday to Friday it is 8 to 12 only which means [Audio not clear] hours per day so once I have created my research calendar the next step is I need to connect my research calendar to the research activity because currently my research task scheduled as per my project calendar.

I am just going to double click this particular task, which brings up a task information dialog and I am going to the advanced tab where you can find there is a drop down here called calendar remember this calendar what you are currently looking on your screen is coming under the task information dialog so this calendar is called as the task calendar, so what it implies is any calendar what you select from this drop down will be the used for scheduling that particular task whether the resource is available or not as per your working time it will force that task to start as per the calendar what you are selecting here.

Let me change my task calendar from none to research calendar and let me say okay now you are able to find now my research is ideally starting on 8 am and it completes at 12 okay, so you are able to see on your task inspector the task calendar research calendar is used rather than the project calendar so the key point you need to remember is we have 4 types of calendar in project right one is called base calendar other is called project calendar the 3rd is called resource calendar and the last one is called as task calendar.

Whenever project schedules a task it will first search for a task calendar, if the task calendar is set naturally the task calendar will be used for scheduling the start and the finish date of (( )) if I have a resource calendar for that particular task let’s say row number 2 I am having the resource assigned naturally resource calendar will be used for scheduling the particular activity let’s say if I have a task where I am neither assigned a task calendar or resource calendar then naturally the project calendar will be used as a default calendar for scheduling that particular activity.

Coming back to my example, in this example I have said my resource calendar is standard my task calendar is morning [Audio not clear] you are still able to see research is still done through the task calendar rather than the resource calendar so this is what you ideally need to remember whenever you are scheduling it so coming back to the demonstration here, though the resources working available 8 hours per day but I would like the task to be scheduled only 4 hours per day. Naturally the 15 hours of effort will ideally splits across 4 working days from Monday to Thursday but that could be a situation where you would ideally want that task to be done during morning time but the resource is available only during a evening time.

Let take this scenario what will happen now, I am just going to say research as you can see the research calendar the morning time that is 8 to 12 is when the research should ideally happen so now I am going back to my resource sheet and currently if you look at this particular resource is working time is 8 to 12, I am just going to say this particular resource let me cancel this may be let me create a new resource and let’s assume that I have another resource called Ram and I am going to say this resource is working only during a night shift which means when I say night shift working time starts at 11 pm and he goes back home at 8 am everyday which means that this resource will not be available to do a research because research ideally be a conducted only between 8 to 12 hour.

This next resource called Ram to the research activity, now let me try to bring ram, the movement I click Ram you are able to see project gives you an [Audio not clear] my resource calendar and my task calendar because my task calendar is during day time whereas resource working during night time so there is a conflict here so when I say okay I hope you are able to see for this particular task research you are able to see my task inspector now also gives you an error saying that the resources are assigned on a non working time and the resource who is affected is Ram.

[Audio not clear] bottom the calendar that is used for this particular task is still research because the research the task calendar is always give a priority than the resource calendar, you can also see because of this conflict that was small indicator that you are from the information column that tells you that there is no enough working time between a task calendar and a resource calendar. The only way to resolve this problem is I need to point some alternate resource to do this task or I need to change the working time of Ram so that he is available during the research (( )), But in case if you want to ignore this problem for what are the reason it is you can just double click that particular task and you can go to the advanced tab and place that using the task calendar as research you just have a small check box (( )) to it, it says the scheduling can ignore the resource calendars, so when you [Audio not clear] option you can see the indicator what you got in the indicators column that it would have automatically disappeared but you can see for that particular task there would be a red color stick man that will appear because the resource anyway over allocated because him to work on that particular task so that is not his [Audio not clear] working time.

The long scenario what I demonstrated was we have a resource calendar who is working on morning and let’s say the task calendar which is scheduled on evening so naturally the task calendar here will take priority than the resource calendar and the work will be scheduled only during 1 to 5 rather than 8 to 12.

Let me first summarize all the points what I just showcased to you so let me take each scenario first, if you look at my review document you can see this task is scheduled as per my standard calendar because for this particular activity I have [Audio not clear] project calendar is generally used.

We were just talking about the different scenarios that might we just recollected in terms of calendars, so the 1st option what we had was we took the scenario of using the project calendar so in review document you might see that on your task inspector we have the calendar standard has been selected as the project calendar so to understand how this work is getting divided I am just going to split this screen you can see on my view ribbon I have clicked on details and I am just going to change my bottom view to what we call as task usage.

The task usage is going to give you who are going to do that activity and how long it is going to be done in a time phased representations, let me change it. Now you are able to see that this activity is scheduled as per your project calendar so let me try to say this activities not done as per project calendar it is than as per the resource calendar so the movement I select a resource is working during morning you can see that the work is going to be divided across several days you can see that based on the resource availability or the resource calendar only the work is getting scheduled so he does not work 8 hours per day every day.

If you look at the next activity that is research you might find that this task is also scheduled only 4 hours per day but you might find that this task is schedule more as per your task calendar rather than the resource calendar the reason is because the resource who is assigned to this particular task is working during night shift but we have ask this task to be scheduled using the morning calendar.

These are all the several option which you just need to remember when you are trying to configure calendars few more option which you just need to remember is though we have 3 types of calendar called the project calendar the resource calendar and the task calendar all of them are based on a repository of calendar called as base calendar, so when you say base calendar it is more location specific so if you look at days calendar in this project I can go to the project ribbon and I can click on the change working time you can see there are different calendars that are listed here.

The 1st 3 calendars is what I generally call as a base calendar you can even see base call as base calendar, days calendar generally reference the working time of a location or a city whereas the resource calendar is more specific to a particular individual this resource is ideally based on one of the calendar so you might find the resource Sai is based on this standard calendar but he might have his own working time so whether you are going for a base calendar or a resource calendar there is always an option available on the bottom where you might want to change their working time for example if you look at the resource Sai and I want to say this resource working time is going to be different so the way to do it is you might find the working time is 8 to 12 and in case if I just wanted to change it on selected day.

You might want to make use of the exceptions tab, on the exception tab you can set any details about the calendar that is again the work weeks, for example let’s say on 10th of September I want to say this resource is working from 8 to 12, 1 to 5 so I can go to the exception tab and I can just give a different working time for example if I say different working time and I can select that particular row and I can click on detail, on details it will bring you a dialog where you have an option to say whether that day is a non working day or a working day.

If I say working day you have an option to say it is 8 to 12 and it is 1 to 5 you can give the specific days, on specific days you can give the working time and the non working days also and you can also have recurrence patterns associated with it, this is ideally I can say I am highlighting feature when you are talking about calendar because all of us do have very common requirement where we would like to say certain days are holidays across all the month or across all the years right so you would ideally make use of this recurrence pattern, for example if I say 10th of September we are having this is the working time and this happens every month so I can just say monthly I can say the date 10th of every month and it will end after let say 12 month.

This will allow you to ensure that you have a pattern associated with it and naturally it is much more easy to maintain it now because tomorrow when the working time ideally change the you don’t need to make multiple changes you don’t need to make multiple changes in your project you just need to go their exception and you just need to change your recurrence pattern or your work weekly, as you can see 10th has been set as a different working time whereas 11th if you observe the working time is still as per your work weeks only if I just having navigate to the next month.

You can see every 10th right the previous month and I can say September, October, November all the 10th of every month the working time has ideally we change as per what we need. Whether we are making use of base calendar or a resource calendar there are 2 options available for us so work weeks allows you to change the default working time of your week days, but if you want to set exceptions like you want to have a different working time or you want to have a holiday or vacation to the factor into the calendar make use of the exceptions tab for recording those details.

Differentiate between a Base Calendar and a Resource Calendar

When you want to customize your working time I recommend that go to the change working time option of your project ribbon to do that and depending on what you are current view is, naturally different calendars will be displayed or in other words if I am just looking at my let’s say if my current view is my Gantt chart and I click on my change working time you will be able to find only your project calendar or your base calendar listed by default but if my view currently is my resource sheet, Depending on which calendar you are looking at or which view you are looking at currently your change working time will ideally change.

so these are some of the differences you might want to know, when we talk about base calendar as you know it is more something to do with city or work location where you can just set the working time and the exceptions more at a very high level but when you look at resource calendar they are ideally based on one of those base calendars what you have created so you might say an analyst is working as per India or analyst is working as per US.

Where US and India generally created (( )) the base calendars so the last option which I just wanted to demonstrate here is how to share the calendars what you have created across projects because you would have created a calendar called India or US or UK or you would have customized your standard calendar how you share it, so there is an option called organizer so let me show you where you can find it.

On your file that stage you can find there is an option called info under info there is a button called organizer, this organizer will allow you to manipulate the template file as well as you can copy your calendars across multiple projects, in my current machine I just open only 1 active project so let me create another sample project so you can find there are 2 projects I just have ideally opened okay, you can see there are 2 projects ideally I have 1 project 3 another is [Audio not clear] so let’s say I have created a research calendar I hope all of you do know I have created a base calendar called research, due to some reason I would like to share this research calendar to others so the way to do it is you need to click on file, info, organizer and you can see there are several tabs here.

All these tabs represents the different components of your project plan, I am going to select calendars here you can see on my sample plan the research calendar which we created is available so if I want to share this research calendar to another project I can just open the other project plan and I can just select the other project here and I can just do a copy so which means the other project will now have my research calendar so the other user need not spend time in creating these calendars but only catch here is since you have done a copy any change your making in your research calendar will not get automatically synchronize with your other calendars you need to copy it again and again whenever you are try to manipulate these calendars.

Just to help you to understand those 4 calendars let me summarize those the 1st one is what we call as base calendar so the base calendar that are provided by Microsoft project or the standard in night shift and the 24 hours you are always free to create your own new base calendar through the change working option.

So the base calendar represents the default working time of your resource they are ideally used as a project calendar or the task calendar or resource calendar also a simple example could be if I have team who is working across 3 location let’s say Chennai, Pune and Calcutta and each location has a different working time naturally you need to create 3 base calendars, because each base calendar maps to one location of your team.

Let’s say if all the 3 cities you have the same working time same holidays one base calendar is enough in this particular scenario so once you have created base calendar visualize that those calendars are like a library of all calendars, now you can pick and choose which base calendar should be use as a default calendar for your next calendar called project calendar.

So the project calendar can be one of the base calendars that are used for scheduling your activities in project 2010, so one of the simple example is when you have an high level estimate prepared and when you prepare high level plan you might want most of your activities to be done from off shore or from one city, so I prefer that (( )) that base calendar of that particular city to the project calendar because project can automatically schedule all those activities as per your project calendar.

The next one which I discussed was the resource calendar I hope you know a resource calendar just implies that it defines the working time on the non working days of a specific individual so a resource calendar is ideally based on the base calendar and it is very specific to a particular resource so naturally every resource can have their own working time and their own holidays which we have seen that which can be configured through the working time and their exceptions and the last one which you would be discuss on the task calendar you might want to schedule a task as per as specific working time. Simple example could be a down time activity you might want this down time to happen only during a non working hours or after office hours or only during a weekend.

By default when I try to assign a resource to a task base from resource availability only a task will be scheduled so you might want to task to be scheduled not as per resource availability but using a different calendar like a weekend calendar or after working time calendar something like that when you go for the last calendar called as task calendar.

Task calendar is also one of the base calendar in our example we said the research calendar can be used as the task calendar so which means whether the resource was available or not naturally that task was scheduled as per the resource calendar only.

Just to summarize I think these are the point what we discussed calendars are very important because they define the working time at a project level, and the resource level and at a task level also so there are 4 types of calendars we said one is called base, one is called project the 3rd one is called resource, last one is called as task calendar always remember when project scheduling the activity it will follow bottom of approach it will first look at a task calendar is not available it will move on to the next calendar called resource these the resource calendars not available it will move on to the project calendar that will have the default calendar for your project.

In order to change the working time or to set exception you can need go to the change working time option of your project ribbon to do that and finally make use of the organizers option on your back stage either rename a calendar, to copy the calendar or to delete any of the base calendars which you created.

The next one which is coming up next week is on September 12th 3pm we are going to have a live interactive radio show which means ideally you will be asking questions when you actually ask question I will be able to answer it live.

You can either post those questions during a program or on your Techgig when you try to register there is an option available on the bottom where you can post your questions also, so you can post your questions or any queries ideally we have in terms of your current project so we will try to compile all those questions and that will be answered as a part of webinar.

You can also write to me this is the email address so webradio@sainivas.com. So you can post your question you can attach your schedules which have those problems which you would like to troubleshoot we will try to compile all those things and will try to understand It.

The 3rd session of this series will happen on 4th October that is when we are going to talk about how to create a work breakdown structure? How to identify activities and documented and we also talk about the task dependencies in terms of project 2010.

Thank you this is my email address if you have any queries on the topic what we discussed today if you like the session please go to my Facebook page “Saithesimple” and please click on like.

Video length - 00:59:39

631 attendees

Conducted on - 12 Sep,2012

4612 views

About Speaker
B Sai PrasadSenior Manager Learning & Development, Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd
B Sai Prasad, Senior Manager – Learning & Development, has been with service provider Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd since 2001 where he was named winner of the company's Global Trainer of t...
In session 1, you learnt how Project 2010 structures and stores the schedule data, different features including Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface Microsoft® Office Backstage™ View, Task Inspector tool and the new Team Planner view In session 2, we would focus on calendars in Project 2010. Today, project teams are mostly distributed. Each location has different working time and holidays. These differences should be taken into account to build a forecast-ready schedule. Try answering the below questions. If your answer is “Yes” for at least one, then this session is for YOU.

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Project ManagementMicrosoft Project 2010

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