Standard work

Use standard work to represent time that a permanent resource is not available to work on project activities. Standard work might be activities such as administration or training of other staff. When you assign a permanent resource to a task, the task's elapsed duration is adjusted to take the resource's standard work into account.

For example, a Manager might spend 25% of her time doing administration work so she is free to work on project activities for 75% of his time. If the Manager works an 8 hour day, she can only spend 6 hours of each day (75%) on project activities. So if she is the only resource assigned to a task that requires 36 hours of effort, that task will take 6 working days to complete, although it would be completed in 4.5 working days if the Manager spent 100% of her time on the activity.

If all your permanent resources work to the same working week, you could represent their different vacation periods as standard work instead of editing each resource's calendar. To do this:

Set up a calendar with the typical working week and public holidays marked on it.
Assign the calendar to all your permanent resources.
Create a standard work type of 'Vacation'.
Each time a permanent resource has a holiday period, assign the Vacation standard work to that resource and specify the start and finish dates of that vacation period. Because all your resources are using the same calendar, if you need to change the working week or add some overtime, you only need to edit one calendar.

Once you assign standard work to a resource, any existing allocations of that resource are adjusted to take account of the standard work. This might cause the elapsed duration of some tasks to change if the resource has been assigned as a resource-driven allocation.

You can organise your standard work types into a hierarchy, grouping related types together into folders, which makes it easier to find the standard work type you are looking for when you assign standard work to resources.

You can display standard work as shading on the bar chart. If you choose to do this, it appears on the allocation bars of resources that have standard work assignments. You can choose which types of standard work to display on the bar chart. Displaying standard work on the bar chart helps you to see when resources are not available to work on project activities because they are engaged in standard work activities.

If you want to prevent users from assigning certain types of standard work to permanent resources, you can mark such standard work types as 'inactive' to prevent their use. For example, you may want to mark historic standard work types as inactive in order to reduce the number of standard work types that appear when standard work is assigned. To mark a standard work type as inactive, clear the Active check box on the Standard Work Properties dialog; select the Active check box to make an inactive standard work type active once more.