Project management for Mac OS X - When I assign 2 resources to one activity the duration doubles. Why?

When I assign 2 resources to one activity the duration doubles. Why?

When you schedule an activity with a duration of 5 days and you assign two resources to work on that, the duration of this activity is still 5 days, but the working duration is 10 days. Why?

This is not easy to understand. Let us go through an example.

We have the activity "install server". This activity needs 2 days. We schedule it from November 1st to November 2nd, 2004. We have two resources (Steve and Phil) available for this to be done.

The start date is 11/01/2004
The end date is 11/02/2004
The duration is 2 days
The net working duration is 4 days (because 2 resources are working 2 days)
The gross duration is 2 days

To reduce the net working duration, reduce ? in the info area for the activity (tab "Assign") ? the duration for each resource. If you set them to 50% you will have an net working duration of 2 days.

We can do this example pretty more complex by adding the resources costs or let them working over a weekend, but for the first example this should be enough.

If you have any questions on this article, please post a comment below.