[highcamp]

Ok, sorry about that, in the above example my main concerns were the cost association of the resource person and the duration association of the task. I guess I should have clarified that. Using a real world example, think of assigning an hourly employee with the task of finding the best fit shipping materials supplier. The employee needs to call a slew of suppliers and talk with them about their products. Naturally, some contacts won't be immediately available and thus the employee will have to wait for a call back. For such a task, I would assign a Duration of 2 days (taking into account 'phone tag' and such), whereas the Effort will likely be at most 3 hours of total work, thereby allowing the employee to engage in other tasks during that 2 day time Duration.

On such a problem, the only solutions I've come up with are 1) adding Lead time to a task, which in effect will delay the start date of the next task, and 2) tinkering with Efficiency percentages. Both are poor substitutes for decoupling Effort and Duration, and so I'd think there has got to be a legit solution.

-Erik