MS Project 2007

Hi Catherine

Thank you for your email and your patience.

I understand the problem you describe. The default settings for Project offer a 5 day working week with an 8 hour day.

In Tools > Change working time you can specify the hours for the default calendar. There is also a second group of settings to adust. These are found in Tools > options > Calendar

Here you will find the settings for default start and end times. These are used by Project to align both your tasks, and the beginning of your project to the correct times.

The hours per day / week section ensures that when you set a task duration to 1 day Project gives it the correct duration.
Ideally the calendar's working time, default start / finish times and hours per day all correspond with each other.

Your project may also be starting at the wrong time of day. Check this by turning on times alongside dates by going to tools > options > view and setting the date to include a date plus time. Go to Project > Project info and take a look at the time your project starts. You may need to correct it to come back into line with the defaults you set in tools > options calendar.

Project has no conversion process to handle this switch to longer or shorter working days. If your project contained tasks before you change any of these settings then you are likely to experience odd results in the plan. Increasing your working time may result in the schedule shortening. Decreasing the working time is likely to result in these tasks taking longer to complete. Either way the durations will no longer be rounded in days but probably contain fractions of days. These could be corrected by hand however if resources have been assigned then edits may cause further problems.

These problems can be avoided if the above settings are applied and set as default and then a brand new project is created. This project will align tasks to the new calendar and set them to matching durations.

Try setting up a new project, setting the defaults then making a new plan and test it. You may then want to copy existing tasks over checking their durations are correct. If you have assigned resources you will likely need to go through this process again, watching out for effort driven scheduling and task types.

Let me know if this describes the problem you are having and if you have any further questions.


Kind regards,
Andrew