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Effort-Driven Activities

With effort-driven activities, you can have Open Plan calculate the activity duration based on the activity's resource assignments. Typically, you might enter resource assignments at an early stage of the planning process and then use this feature to generate durations for activities automatically.

To calculate an effort-driven duration, Open Plan determines the longest span implied by any assignment for the activity by dividing the amount of the assignment by the resource effort factor. The result of the calculation is expressed in the default duration units used by the project.

The availability or non-availability of the resource does not affect the results of this calculation.

For example, assume the activity has a single resource assignment based on the following information:

  • Resource assignment:  10 units
  • Resource effort factor:  0.5
  • Default duration unit for project:  days

Open Plan would calculate the effort-driven duration as 20 days (10/0.5). To perform this calculation, Open Plan interprets any assignment level as a total requirement and ignores any assignment offsets and periods.

Defining an activity as effort-driven also affects the behavior of the activity during subsequent resource scheduling sessions as follows:

  • The activity is assigned the reprofilable attribute. (You can override this setting if you wish.)
  • Resource assignments defined as levels are treated as totals using a linear spread curve.
  • Assignment offsets and periods are ignored.
Note: To change an effort-driven activity back to one with a fixed duration, you can change the activity type to ASAP, or you can overwrite the calculated duration manually. If you enter a fixed duration but keep the activity type set to Effort Driven, Open Plan automatically recalculates the duration the next time you enter or change resource assignment information.

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