Apply Different Calendar Resoruces on the Same Task in MS Project 2016

I came across the situation where I have to propose different strategies to our management to intiate the next project phase considering the project constrainsts of time, cost, quality, risks, resources and client satisfication.

Whenever Project Manager came across similar situation he or she should brainstrom and list down different strategies that can be presented to the internal stakeholders before discussing them with the external stakeholders such as client and partners.

I formulated 6 strategies and started planning them on the Microsoft Project 2016 to see the impact on the project constraints mainly time, cost and resources, however the remaining constraints can be evaluated separately.

First three strategies were straight forward and could be easily planned in the MS Project by setting up either sequential or/and parallel dependencies. For the remaining 3 strategies, I had faced troubles when I have to define different calendars for the resources and then assign them on the same task. For Instance, I want my regular project resource to work full week including weekends and borrow additional resources to work on only weekends, therefore defined different calendar for each set of resources.

It's common when you put additional resources on the task, so its duration should be decreased, but it was other way around. I was surprised to see that activities duration were increased by applying more resources with different calendars (Full week + Weekend resources). I have tried different ways to accommodate both the resources in one task, but unfortunately wasn't able to see the results which I want to achieve.

I came to know that MS Project divide task equally among all resources, so as a result the resources working on Weekends stretching the timelines as they are working two days in the whole week. Let say, R1 assigned standard calendar has to work 4 days to complete the task and R2 assigned weekends calendar on the same task which requires the same amount of efforts. When you apply both these resources on the same task, the duration of the task would be two weeks instead of 4 days as the R2 resource two weekends to complete the tasks considering you are starting activity from Monday.

In order to balance the situation you need to plan wisely by limiting the resoruce to certain end date, it won't equally divide the work, however, you would be able to finish the activity earlier.

Following are the steps that you need to perform on MS Project 2016:

1. Assign R1 & R2 to the same activitiy having duration of X days.
2. Assign R1weekdays calender & R2 weekend calendar, I am not showing how to create different calendar, because you can easily Google it.
3. One assigned, click Task then click on Details in Task Ribbon in Properties section
4. Now, you will see Task Details Form, Right Click on Resource Name in Task Details Form.
5. Click on Schedule from the Menu and set the schedule finish date as per your requirements. Say if you want to finish the activity in a period of week, so you can utilize R2 resource only for 1 weekend which is equivalent to two days.

I hope you would be able to apply these planning techniques in your project plan. Please don't forget to leave your comments not only for the feedback, but also for your queries which I will try to address.