 Hi there in this video. I'm going to show you how to estimate duration for your project and tasks as well as Hi there in this video I'm going to show you how to estimate duration as well as work effort within your project and within the tasks Before we do that. I want to kind of explain what do I mean by that? Well, the duration is Simply the delta between the start and finish date of a given task You see in this project schedule. I've actually gone in and done my predecessors, etc You know, so for example if I make this two days, you can see that the delta between one three and one four is now two days Starts on Monday finishes on Tuesday two days. Thank you three days You see that have there goes to Wednesday and everything else is trickling on from that The duration column is always there and typically the best way to Estimate the duration of your tasks is to come in here and add some duration What I want to do though is show you how to estimate the work. What do I mean by that? Well, you know, this task dig foundation goes on for three days and if we assume That one person is working on it. Let's say comm is working on it You know that work would be if he's working full-time We're talking 21 hours for that Actually right-click on start and put insert column work 24 hours What I said, maybe in my math wasn't working That's why we have Microsoft project to help us So, you know, you can see three days 24 hours. That's with one resource I actually take that resource off of the task You see the work goes down to zero hours That's because no one's working it. It's just a duration. There's no work going on So when we add a resource By default that resource is working full-time on that particular task. You can adjust that if you like So the work is calculated at 24 hours Now when you're going through an estimating you probably want to be doing this before you've even come in and assigned your resources, right? Let's go and remove the resources out The first thing we do is estimate duration and how much work. Let's leave the resources out of it to take a foundation It's generally a crew of people and it takes them 40 hours for a week All right, there's a crew of people. It's gonna be let's say three on the crew takes them three days So, you know, I estimate that the effort for that is probably around a hundred hours of Actual labor if we have ten people working it I could get it done a lot quicker. It's just one person It's gonna take them two and a half weeks So we come in and estimate the work at hundred hours To lay the rebar has probably only about eight hours of work You know generally takes you have to go in and put some in and then come back another day And they generally do that over a three-day period eight hours of work three days You see the disconnect got a little bit of work going on over a long duration This is the real world It's really important to actually come in here and estimate not just the duration But how much effort is involved? So it's gonna affect everything from how much hours we have work hours It's actually it's gonna cost ultimately and I'll show you some of that Poor the concrete, you know, that only takes a day, but it takes a little, you know Four or five different people to do it. We're gonna say, you know, overall it's about a hundred hours of effort across the team Record just one day, but you know, there's a crew of two to do that. So we'll call it 16 hours Maybe a little bit more if they have a bit more extra time. Maybe we'll estimate it at 20 hours Well, this is a milestone zero day duration zero out of work In the drywall, let's say that's gonna take 10 days and it's gonna take, you know, 40 hours Boom So as you can see, we can quickly come in. I'm just gonna add these in here Electricals takes 29 days Maybe they're just coming in off and on and wait for other people to do their work in between But it's only roughly 80 hours. So we're working part-time on that generally So there we go. We've got the duration and the work for estimated When we start now adding resources To these tasks You can see how it's now calculating and adjusting for me If you really want to get it a little bit more granular on this what you can actually do is come to the view ribbon and Check details. This is actually called the task format. We can see for a given task what's going on for three days You can see How much work's going on for this particular task lay the rebar Now what we have to do is actually assign a resource in here put scarlet on that one. That's okay See how the work is calculated Now because it's a three-day task Only eight hours of work though, you know She is now working 33% Was then she's working part-time at 33% of a typical working day as you come in and Estimate the work and the duration by the duration and the work in addition to that You can get more granular and you can see these calculations taking place Rather than having a three-day task and by default it is something that resource 100% units Therefore it would have been 24 hours work as opposed to three but because we've estimated the work We've estimated the duration Microsoft project calculates the unit for us a scarlet Let's take another example of this so paint balls. We have not estimated a work effort for this one So when I assign a resource to this one here Let's put Tom on that one by default. It's going to be a hundred percent units full-time Boom 80 hours full-time 80 hours two weeks 40 hours a week Do the same thing behind drywall Put Tom on there as well You can see Tom's working 50% we supply two variables Microsoft project calculates the third by estimating the duration and the work Microsoft project always going to calculate the duration in you and start the units for us So if we do increase the duration You see the work is actually going to go up Portionately to the units of that particular put resource. So we put an extra two days It added an extra eight hours Because he's only working part-time 50 50 percent duration. Sorry 50 percent units, which is four hours per day So there we go Estimating duration and work can really help you when you're calculating out The most important thing in your project, which is going to be The costs so as we come in and get very granular with this the costs are going to be calculated for us Based on the resources hourly rate very important When estimating the duration estimate the work so that when you assign a resource We're getting an accurate picture of how many hours that particular resource is going to work on that task Not only that as you add additional resources, we go back to the Gantt chart view You will see that the work can be split appropriately So if I have 100 out, let's take another example here 10 days 80 hours if I make this an effort driven task and assign a second resource the work will be split across both resources Effort driven essentially locks the work for that task says You know this task is 80 hours. I don't care how many people you throw at it It's going to be 80 hours of actual work the duration can vary But it's an effort driven task There we go So because I had that first calculation effort unlocked it As I add and take away resources, it's going to really really help me To keep that number of hours consistent I could talk about this all day, but thanks so much for watching. I do have other videos. I'll post the link to it here around tracking effort driven and task types Which is exactly what we're talking about Here with fixed duration fixed work fixed units effort driven all that stuff If you want to get more granular with that it will really help you as well Thanks so much for watching. Please like and subscribe. I really appreciate your time Thanks for watching