There are 3 task types you should be aware of, I’ll discuss all of them with examples.įixed work is by it’s definition a effort driven activity. Because the effort (work) should remain the same, and drives the amount of time it would take to do the work.ĭifferent task types respond differently to Effort driven. The later examples would be entered in Microsoft Project as “Effort driven” tasks. Other activities can however be divided across resources, such as painting a fence, or building a wall.

Have you ever heard the phrase “9 woman can’t make a baby in 1 month” or “1 ship sails across the ocean just as fast as 10 do”? This is because not all work can be divided by adding more “resources” to the activities being pregnant or sailing the ocean. This is particularly useful in a view that you use when allocating your resources. The Effort driven column will show up and you can select it to include it in the current view. You can also add the Effort driven column in any of the task related views by right clicking any column and selecting “insert column” and typing Effort. The split screen is a very useful method to enter resource assignments, and it has the Effort driven check mark. Keep in mind that this setting is only related to new tasks. You can set the schedule default value from the File Options –> schedule menu.Īnd this option even comes with a great explanation for Effort driven tasks, that we will dive into a bit later in this article. And you might be more interested to know about baselines (for instance). If you don’t have resources in the schedule you won’t have to “worry” about this feature. This feature is only interesting to know about for schedules that contain resource allocations. This post discusses the effects of the Effort driven option. And it has massive effects on a schedule. Have you ever worked on a schedule and, when adding resources, wondered about this small little checkbox called “effort driven”? It’s a small checkbox that’s not always as visible as you might want it to be.

Ms project gantt chart effort