Editing Actual Work In MS Project

One of Project's strengths is its ability to adjust variables as a project changes. For example, if you change the Actual Work hours on a project, the application will adjust the duration over the appropriate time period. Let's look at an example of a project with a two-day duration and a Fixed Units task.

If we assign a resource to this task at 100 percent units, the resource by default is assigned to work two eight-hour days, making the task a 16-hour effort. If you mark this task as 50 percent complete and then look at the Task Usage view (right-click in the Timescaled area and then select Actual Work from the menu), you'll see that the task is broken down into two eight-hour days with eight hours of Actual Work for the first day.

What do you think will happen if you change the eight hours of Actual Work for that first day to six hours? How will the task change? Because it is a Fixed Units task, Project will take those two hours and add them on the task onto a third day, making the task a 2.25-day duration task.

What about if we had made that same edit to a task that was a Fixed Duration task type? The hours have to go somewhere, but the task type suggests that it should not be to the third day. Therefore, Project adds them onto the end of the second day, making the second day a 10-hour day for our resource. This bumps the Assignment Units value to 125 percent.

What if the task was Fixed Work? We're changing work values for a Fixed Work task, so what happens? Anytime work is edited on a Fixed Work task, Project will edit the duration. So in this case, the two hours are added to the third day, just as in the Fixed Units case.