If you change the duration of that task to 5 days, Project will assume you are adding another 2 hours of effort, and total effort will now read 10 hours. You set the duration to 4 days, and the total effort to 8 hours. Here's an example: If you have a task that you'll be working on for 2 hours a day, and you know it will take 8 hours to complete. If you meant to shorten duration by adding a second assignee, you will need to do that by reducing duration, and you'll have to reduce the hours as well. However, when you assign a task to 2 people, while the duration will stay the same the effort for that task will double. This is because Project assumes when you add a second resource you have another set of the same amount of work for that second person. First developed by the United States Navy in 1958, it is commonly used in conjunction with the critical path method (CPM) that was introduced in 1957. If you add Duration before you add Start and Finish dates, Project will use the project Start date as the Start date of your task, and set the Finish date based on the Duration you entered.Īssignment: Assigning a task to one group member will not affect either effort or duration. The program (or project) evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a statistical tool used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project. If a group contains three one-hour tasks all happening at the same time, the group has a duration of one hour, not three hours.

Duration The duration of a group is the amount of time between the beginning of its first task and the end of its last task, not the sum of the durations of all its tasks. Note: If you add Start and Finish dates before you add Duration, Project will fill in the duration based on these dates. (An empty group has no effort or duration and can serve as a placeholder.) Effort The effort of a group is the sum of the effort of all tasks it contains.

Omniplan effort vs duration