I received several emails about how to schedule a 3 day task that only has 4 hours of work.  It is common to have a resource committ to completing a task within 3 days although the total amount of work doesn't equate to 24 hours.  In other cases, project managers want to schedule the work for a resource over a 3 day period and adjust the utilization.

Frustration can set in when the project manager tries to set the duration, work and overall resource utilization.  The secret to avoiding this planning problem is to understand the Microsoft scheduling equation and only pick two of the variables.

I published the article on Tech Republic Using a fixed duration task type in Microsoft Project

Let me know what you think!