Fixed Work, I'm a convert

I am not going to pretend I have the pros and cons of Fix Work, Fixed Units and Fixed Duration down 100% of the time. That said, I do regularly try to determine which is best to use in my MS project plan. For a fantastic review of how each works in MS project please check out this:

http://www.pmconnection.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=52

Thank you pmconnections.com for the best review of this topic that I have seen!

So now that you have reviewed this and can consider yourself among the great schedulers of our day, you might wonder why I am excited about fixed work?

I work in an environment where I rarely know what resource commitments I will get and often can't estimate purely on the basis of how long a period of time will be required for a work package (for the cited resource issue and other issues). This leaves me with work.

Even in my constrained environment, I can get either the resources or a qualified stand in resources to help estimate the amount of work required to complete each work package. Once I create the work column and estimate the work, I can then create the duration I feel is likely (if I am forced to do this on my own) by assigning generic qualified resources and then playing with how much allocation % I think I will get from them. The duration is then recalculated, based on this. I can also then more the duration around (if required) which will recalculate my resource requirements.

I can also add in other factors, but no matter what, my original work estimates stay fixed and this seems to really limit the strange things that project sometimes likes to do.

So my advice is that if you are in an environment like mine, stop estimating duration and instead estimate work (and fix it).

Next Time: Is MS Project enough (or where is my Monte Carlo Sim)?