This is a tip of our CEO, Frank Blome, as discussed at the CeBIT 2010 and published on our German MacPM blog:
Supposedly you plan an activity of 5 days work to be accomplished in the duration of 10 days. As an experienced PM and Merlin user you create the activity in your project as follows:
This results to a 50% utilization for the assigned resource
Your resource starts working on this activity and at the end of its second day, enters the actual work done so far. This translates by the current utilization (50%) to a progress of 4 calendar days:
Now your resource and you realise that the originally planned  5 days of work are not enough to complete the activity, and that rather a total of 7 days would be necessary, so you enter this information into the actuals:
You notice the delay in accomplishing your goal and inform your client accordingly but he insists that the task should be completed on time.
Well, this is fine for Merlin. You simply switch to the ‘Plan’ pane of the inspector, enter the latest end date and enable the ‘fix’ flag:
If you now check the utilization view you’ll see the new dynamically adjusted percentage of the assigned resource calculated as 70%
Your goal is achieved if your resource manages to complete this activity on the March 19, 2010, which is by a utilization of 70% Â rather probable.
How do i control utiilsation so that i can make some days work at 0% and other at 100% rather than an average
It helps me plan and assign resources with a shared resource pool etc
you need to cut the activity into sub activities so you can define different utilisation values to each. Whereby I wouldn’t then define subactivites for 0% utilisation. Best regards, Vicky