Durations in P3

You question implies that are interested in a theoretical point of perfection.

Are you trying to create a simulation or a schedule? They are not the same thing. I have never found tracking real work in fractions of hours to be a useable tool.

Are you prepared to status your schedule in fractions of an hour? To do this, you will need to status every activity at the same time, say every 10 minutes. Else wise, how are you going to know that Activity X finished three minutes late and Activity Y started two minutes early?

Once you inventory every active activity, enter the status, recalculate the critical path, and print the report, your information will be out of date. Even if it is not, it will be a moot point before you can call a meeting of the responsible parties, decide a corrective action, and implement it.

This is not the Sims. A schedule should be created and maintained for a purpose other than giving it life. For a vast majority of real projects, Hourly schedules are of dubious use. We do not not live in a world where Minutely schedules are of any practical use.

Focus on the objective. That will tell you the type of tools that you need.

Ronald,
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply, I was trying to create activities in minutes and then adding a hammock over the days work and having it as a resource driving plan, then if it was starting to run late I could add another resource, I am not worried if it runs late by minutes but on a general day basis. I would just schedule it by days work, but they want to see every single activity on the schedule.

Thanks again for your earlier help

I have an occasion a couple of years ago to schedule resource requirements in minutes and produce histograms on a 5 minute time interval. This was to simulate the ground crew resource requirement at 4 international airports for a weeks of domestic and international aircraft arrivals and departures. Unfortunately the smallest time unit in P3 (and SureTrak) is 1 hour and the requirement to schedule in minutes is difficult to model.

In this instance I used MicroPlanner Expert due to its excellent resource functionalities. Microsoft Project will handle minutes but its functionality did not suit the reporting requirements.

There are many other good products available that schedule in minutes and if the requirement to schedule in minutes is a prerequisite, and it sometimes is, then I strongly advise you to find another product.

You may consider upgrading to one of the P3e products which allow scheduling in decimal hours and/or minutes, you may find this a cost effective and satisfactory solution.

Regards

Paul E Harris
www.eh.com.au

We also have found the need to develop and maintain schedules with durations less than an hour. This is usually the required setup for Aircraft MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul).

For this, we use P3e since P3 is not capable of handling durations by the minute. Try looking into P3e.

Jorge