Project Service Automation – Work Hours Templates

Work hour templates in PSA, Project Service Automation, are basically pointers to calendars for resources and projects that determine which days of the week are working days, the number of hours worked per day and if the business closures are to be observed. It is important to configure your work hours template before you use them with any projects otherwise your work breakdown structures and estimates will be incorrect.
 
Project Service Automation comes with a default work template which is configured for an 8 hour working day and not to observe business closures which may not suit your projects. Unfortunately there does not seem to be an obvious way to modify the default work template’s calendar so the alternative is to create a new work hour template and to base the template on a resource’s calendar by populating the template resource field.

Each resource in Project Service Automation has its own calendar and if the resource is a user the calendar can be accessed from the users Work Hours related view. Using this option a weekly schedule of working hours can be configured with the option to create schedules for individual days and also to enter time off.  Business closures can also be taken into consideration by checking the observe business closures check box. So here I configured for my own account to work 7 hours a day Mon to Fri and to observe business closures.

I then used this for my work hours template by populating the template resource field as shown in the first screen shot. The user needs to be configured as a bookable resource to be referenced in this manner. When the template is saved the resource’s calendar is copied as a new calendar for the template. The calendars are not linked and any subsequent changes to the resource’s calendar are not reflected in the work hours template.  Selecting a new resource makes no difference either.

To see the differences when using the templates I added a business closure for St Patricks day.

I then created two projects the first uses the Default Work Hours Template and the second uses the new template. I then added a work breakdown task to each project covering two weeks in March. You can see how the task duration and effort in works hours have been calculated using using the different Work Hours Template calendars.

Once you have your work hours template created you can assign this template to resources by selecting the resources and the Set Calendar option.

I hope this post helps understand how you can configure working hours and calendars in Dynamics Project Service Automation.