We have a question about whether it is possible to temporarily increase the working hours of project members to prevent the project end date from changing.

In RTC the basic premise with scheduling appears to be that you record normal working hours of staff and annual leave and then let the actual progress determine when the project will finish. However, we are a little reluctant to have the finish date move forward and are hoping to recover ground by working on a number of weekends.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this. You can permanently change your working hours, but not for a limited time. And it is difficult to change your normal working hours to e.g. include Saturdays and then record most of the Saturdays as holidays, as a workaround. We thought of the Time-Tracking tab in work items, which records actual hours worked on the weekend, but those are different to planned hours.

Would this be a valid RFE?

I ask because I believe this may go against fundamental RTC scheduling concepts. That is.. if your project is behind schedule, you should let the finish date change accordingly to reflect when you might reasonably be expected to finish the project, rather than trying to squeeze extra time out of weekends to make up lost ground etc.. Is this a fundamental concept? (We are using a formal template). Or might this be considered?

Our thinking is sometimes described as plan-based project management and we are not sure, but I think there was some discussion about this in the past. Rational Project Conductor I believe had the ability to have a plan-based schedule, but that was not included in RTC.

See this link for background:
https://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2011/01/18/where-is-rational-project-conductor/