Before going through let us understand what is Unit, Duration and work in MS Project and how they are related.

Unit :  Refers to “Resource”.  Measured as “% Allocation”

Work:    Refers to amount of “Work” to be completed.  Measured as “Hrs”

Duration: Refers to time required to complete work.  Measured as “Days” (Man days etc)

All above are related to each other with formula:

                Duration x Units = Work

Any task created in MS Project defaults to “Fixed Units”.  MS Project supports following types of tasks creation:

Fixed Unit:  A task in which the assigned units [or resources] is a fixed value and any changes to the amount of work or the task’s duration do not affect the task’s units.  Impact of change in Work, Duration or unit of work in a Fixed Unit task can be illustrated as follow:

 

Fixed Duration:  A task in which the duration is a fixed value and any changes to the work or the assigned units [that is, resources] don’t affect the task’s duration.  Impact of change in Work, Duration or unit of work in a Fixed Duration task can be illustrated as follow:

 

Fixed Work:  A task in which the amount of work is a fixed value and any changes to the task’s duration or the number of assigned units [or resources] do not affect the task’s work.  Impact of change in Work, Duration or unit of work in a Fixed Work  task can be illustrated as follow:

Thus using this simple calculation and understanding impact of changes in different types of tasks, one can easily predict changes MS Project is going to make on given tasks.

That’s all

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