 In this video, we're going to look at the type of tasks that exist in Microsoft Project. So there are three types of tasks. Tasks with fixed units, tasks with fixed duration, and tasks with fixed work. We can see this through file options. So go to the file options and go to schedule. Under the default task type. The default type is fixed units. So what this is saying is, if you add resource to a task, the units are fixed, and then if you decrease the units, the time will increase. So that's what this is saying. So we'll try this in first. Then you've got fixed durations, which I'll go through in fixed work. So these are the three types. So fixed units first, have assigned an engineer manager and HR manager to a task at school design and job specification. We're going to say that in this example, the HR manager is only required for 20% of the time. Now, when you allocate by default, it's a 100% allocation of a resource. So I'm going to double click the task, go to the resources area. And we can see that there's a unit, one for a engineer manager. This means 100% allocation and one for a HR manager. This also means 100% allocation. So what we're going to do here is change the allocation of the HR manager to 20%. Well, naturally, as far as the machine thinks, the duration has to increase because if you're going to take the duration away, if you're going to take a resource away from the project task, the duration is naturally going to increase. So we're going to take us down to 20%, 0.20, OK? Now I can see the task length has increased hugely because you've taken a big chunk of resource away from the task. Now there's a little message here with a warning sign. This is the effect of the fixed units because if you click the drop down arrow, it wants to change duration, which is the default for fixed units, when you take resource away from it. Or if you didn't want that and you wanted to say, well, I didn't want that task to increase, I wanted the same duration, but I wanted to decrease the amount of resource, then we can overwrite the default of fixed units and actually change it to keep the amount of work. So this message becomes very, very important when you're allocating resources to task and you are taking or changing the allocation of resource. And this applies to fixed units, fixed duration and fixed work. So here we're going to change it back to keep the same amount of work, change the work, which is the 20%, but keep the duration the same. So this should now go back to four days and there we go. And there's the HR manager at 20% allocation. Now let's see what happens. I've got three other projects, one demonstrating fixed duration, one demonstrating fixed work. So we will use the same example in all three. Again some same task. This time the duration is fixed duration. I can check this by double clicking the task, go to the advanced and I can see it's fixed duration. So I've set this particular task up as fixed duration. So we're now going to change the resource allocation and again I'm going to take the HR manager down to 20%. So resources 0.20, 20%. Okay, now this time the duration didn't increase. So it allowed me to change the resource, but because we fixed duration, the duration has maintained itself. There's a message here which you can then review. Now this says with the second option, which is the default in this case, change the amount of work which we've done, but keep the same duration, which is what's happened because it's a fixed duration. Now we could change the duration and keep the same amount of work. Well this would then change to the 20 days, we don't want to do that, we want this to stay at 4 days. So this can be quite a useful option if you are frequently changing resources around and you want to make sure that the duration doesn't get fixed. So to maintain the existing choice, I'm just going to click on the default option and the message goes away. I'm going to see the same example now with fixed work. So we've seen what happens to fixed duration. The resource allocation changed, but the duration didn't change. You had to make the fixed units, the minute you took resource away from the task, the duration increased and then you had to adjust the option if you wanted to keep the duration the same. Unless what happens with fixed work, again we're going to check, it's against this task and you can see this particular one has got fixed work as a task type. So same example, change the allocation of the HR manager, now this one has changed to 20 days like the fixed unit because it didn't fix the duration, so the duration has now changed so that wasn't fixed, so that's the reason why it's changed. Now we can choose what the message says, change duration, keep the same amount of work, change the amount of work, which is what we want to do, but keep the same duration. So we want the second one. Now we've got the engineer manager and the HR manager 20% and the duration has now maintained the same. So when you're trying to control duration and you're using resources and you've got these three different types of tasks, fixed units, fixed duration and fixed work, you've got to be fairly careful to manage these tasks to make sure these tasks don't run out of control as you start manipulating resource allocation and the message you saw is really important to making sure you choose the right option for the control of that particular task. The default type of task within project and I'll go back to this for the fixed units. So fixed units is the default type of task for a project and you can see this when you go to file, options, schedule and the default task type. Whenever you open up a new project, you'll see the fixed units is the default. So it's almost saying change the duration when you change the amount of resource allocated but sometimes you want to maintain duration so you've got to be careful controlling the message but this is the default task type. Now you can mix and match them. So for example, if I'm going to type in a task called test, just the two day duration against this and if I look at the first task, it's got the default which is fixed units. A test that I wanted to, I could change it to fixed resource, so now you know what I want the resource to be fixed on this one so I can say, okay, I don't want fixed units, I want fixed resource against this particular task or fixed, let's go fixed duration, I want fixed duration against this particular, fixed resource means fixed work. So we'll use fixed duration in this particular example. So if I now see what happens when I add resource to this and quickly add two resources. Now red just means over allocation of resource, this is because there's no linking going on and they're all being used at the same time so I'm not going to worry about red right now. We're just going to show what happens with the different types of task units and different types of tasks. So in this case, we want the type of task as fixed duration so I'm going to take the HR manager down to 20% again and again we can see that the duration isn't affected like the other tasks are with fixed units and fixed work. I can accept the message which I'm about to do or I can change it to the other option where the duration will change, I don't want to do that, I want to keep the duration the same. So I'll just accept the default option and there's an example of how these different task types work. So it's fixed units is the default, there's also fixed duration and fixed work and they can be set up as individual projects. One could be fixed work, fixed units, fixed duration or you could mix and match per project. So this is quite a big decision to make when managing tasks within a project. So the different task types, fixed unit, fixed duration and fixed work must be thought through carefully when managing projects and managing tasks within a project. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you like and subscribe to our channel. Hope to see you for the next tutorial and thanks for watching.