Generally, we assume that working time occurs between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm Monday through Friday. Somewhere around noon, an hour long lunch occurs. What happens when work hours are not standard, or when hours for work change daily? Enter working time exceptions. Working time exceptions are tasks that occur during non-working hours. These may be tasks that take place after 5:00 pm, or tasks that take place on the weekends. Because of this, it is good to know how to set up working time exceptions in your project management software.
Microsoft Project 2007 has a built in feature for dealing with working time exceptions. Each calendar item is associated with from/to dates. Because of this, exception calendars can be added and associated with each calendar item.
After inputting each task for a project, working time exceptions can be entered for effective workweeks. The following are the steps to take in order to enter working time exceptions.
1. Click on the Tools menu and click on Change Working Time... Once you are in this view, you can see the “standard” base calendar with working times from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM Monday through Friday. The default options are “Standard,” “24-Hours,” and “Night Shift.” (Figure 1).
2. Underneath the calendar are “Exceptions” and “Work Weeks.”
3. To adjust the standard work time for your company, click on “Work Weeks” and enter in the hours that employees are expected to work. To use the default times for MS Project, simply click on “Use Project default times for these days.” To set a day as a nonworking time, click on the day and “Set days to nonworking time.” To set specific hours that your company operates (i.e. Saturday mornings), click the day selected, then, “Set day(s) to these specific working times.” (Figure 2) In the workweek view, you can also set up a calendar for long-term deviations or for repeated pattern alterations. For example, if you use the Scrum method, you may have a different calendar for the backlog meetings than you do for the sprint.
4. Once the standard workweek has been set up, working time exceptions can be set up. First, click on Exceptions. Say that a task must be completed after hours, or on a weekend, or on a holiday. You can then title the exception, and set the start and finish dates. Once this has been done, click Details (Figure 3). in this view, you can set this period as non-working or you can alter the working times. Then, you can account for how often during the time the working time exception will occur.
5. In this view, you can also create individual calendars for each resource. Click on Create New Calendar and title the new calendar. This is helpful when you have both full and part time resources, or for resources that work non-standard work weeks. Simply follow the procedures in 1-4 to set up each individual calendar complete with exceptions.