Elapsed duration for a task in MSProject
Just yesterday a colleague of mine started a discussion about task durations, and their implementation in MS Project. Since he is using MS Project for some while now, he is familiar with the measuring concepts of task durations (task may be entered in minutes, hours, days, week, and month or as estimated values by adding a question mark behind the task duration). In plain words he knew the basic concept of adding durations to tasks.
He mentioned that he was trying to assign duration for one task that required 3 whole days to pass before the project can continue. That task was not dependent on working / nonworking days and it had to start on Thursday.
This was a perfect case for elapsed duration task. Elapsed duration is the amount of time a task will take until the task will be considered finished. That time is based on 24h day and a 7 day week where all of the days are considered working days (no holidays and no nonworking days). This kind of duration can not be entered through wizards / dialogs but only manually by adding letter e (elapsed) in front of abbreviations m, h, d, w, mo (1 ed, 2 eh, 3 emo).
This is a nice feature to know if you are involved in construction working project, but I really doubt that you will use this kind of task on IT projects. If anyone knows of an example where this feature may be useful in IT project, I would really like to know. So post a comment…