Combining Effort on Allocation and Effort Activity Budget allocations

You can allocate a combination of differently-modelled resources to a task. The combination of modelling methods you use depends on the way in which you want Asta Powerproject to model the various resources.

One particularly useful combination is to use Effort on Allocation and Effort Activity Budget allocations on a task. If you do this, you can specify that Effort on Allocation modelled allocations contribute to the task's effort budget; normally only Effort Activity Budget allocations contribute to this.

For example, if a task has an effort budget of 200 hours, you know that two resources will each spend exactly 40 hours on the task and you want to calculate the effort that is required by a third resource, you could do the following:

Allocate the three resources to the task.
Enter 200h in the Effort budget field in the Effort & Modelling section of the Task tab of the Bar and Task Properties dialog to give the task an effort budget of 200 hours.
For each of the two resource allocations that will spend 40 hours each on the task:
Set the allocation for which you want to calculate effort to Effort Activity Budget modelling.

Set the allocations to Effort on Allocation modelling, using the Modelling tab of the Permanent Allocation Properties dialog and give each allocation 40 hours of effort.
Select the Contributes to Activity Effort check box on the Assignment tab of the dialog. This indicates that although they are not using the Effort Activity Budget modelling method, their effort is taken into account when the effort of Effort Activity Budget allocations is calculated.

The effort of the Effort Activity Budget allocation is calculated automatically to 120 hours. If you subsequently changed the effort budget of the task, this allocation would be recalculated, but the effort of the other two allocations would remain at 40 hours. If you subsequently added another Effort Activity Budget allocation to the task, the 120 hours would be redistributed between the two Effort Activity Budget allocations.