Recurring Meetings

Is there a way to set up a recurring meeting? How would I enter a status meeting that occurs every Friday from 9:00 to 10:00 for the next year?

My advice Jon, is don’t even try. That is what calendars are for and adding them will just serve to clutter up your plan. We recommend baking overhead into your estimates. Everybody has a certian amount of overhead in their work like regular meetings and reading email. Our advice is to just factor that in when you estimate by basing your estimates on realistic days, not ideal work days.

The other thing to do is make sure you make your ranged estimates wide enough to capture the realistic uncertianty in your environment. The most common thing people do when they first start estimating in ranges is to make the ranges to narrow. Don’t try to be too precise.

Another thing you might do is create some supporting tasks for unplanned stuff that is unestimated, but there if you want to track against it; for example, “Sales Team Support” might linger in an engineering plan and people can track time against it if it comes up.

On our team we also do some interesting stuff with prioritized project folders that model our process. You might find my blog post on it interesting:
http://www.liquidplanner.com/blog/?p=45

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I can understand using the calendar for recurring meetings, but what about other recurring tasks in a project? For example, there could be a task once a week to import the latest data into a testing environment. I would think this would be included in your project estimate because it would certainly affect your time line if it was an involved process.

@wingerrb – I think tastes differ on this for sure, but my take on it is that recurring tasks are like recurring meetings for one person. They are part of your over head. I put them on my calendar.

If you want the task to be part of the plan, that’s a different story. Ultimately we’ll probably add that feature but we don’t have it now (it’s actually a fairly tricky one to build right). If you don’t have to have a specific line item in the plan for the task, then either bake the overhead into estimates of related work or reduce your availability to something like 4 days a week instead of 5 and assume you lose a day a week to general over head.

If you need the line item as a reminder and to track actual work, you could just leave a single task open (non marked done) with no estimate and log time to it as you work on it.

Lastly, you could duplicate the task over and over but, I don’t recommend that until we release our item duplicate feature; it will also clutter up your plan.

Planning scenarios differ; I generally recommend the simplest model of the work you can have and make sure you estimate in realistic ranges.