Group duration?

[Bas-i]

Hi,

first off: Omniplan is great! First time I feel inclined to setup my own project administration iso off-loading it to one of our MS Project jockeys ;)

My problem, or misunderstanding, is this: if I group a bunch of tasks and assign those durations, shouldn't the duration of the group always be equal to the sum of the individual task's durations?

I consistently seem to misunderstand this and my group duration don't add up :(

Thanks,

Bas.

[Lizard]

Not quite. The duration of a group of tasks is the time from the start of the first task to start until the end of the last task to finish. To get version 1 of your product ready to ship might require 6 months of programming, 4 months of testing, and 1 month of writing documentation (totally arbitrary numbers). That's 11 months of effort. But if the testing can start when programming is 3 months in, and documentation get written during the last month of testing, you can start the project at the beginning of January and ship the end of July. So the project is only in-progress for 7 months.