Resource working in simultaneous tasks

Hi! How can I have the same resource working simultaneously on several tasks? Tasks always seem to be postponed for each resource, until he finishes the previous one.

TY.

Currently LiquidPlanner flows out the schedule assuming people are 100% dedicated to each task assigned to them in the project list. The tasks get scheduled from top to bottom. In most cases this is the most efficient way to work and you can go a long way by breaking work up in to smaller chunks and prioritizing those. Sometimes you do want to do true multi-tasking or limit the amount of time someone spends on a task. We are currently designing a multi-tasking feature and want to make sure we provide a solution that is remarkable in terms of working the way people actually think about multi-tasking. Keep in mind that multi-tasking introduces more uncertainty into the whole schedule and we to take that into account in our engine. The feature should be pretty cool because you’ll be able to see the positive impacts to the schedule from working in a less fragmented way.

While some multi-tasking is unavoidable, we have a strong desire to help companies avoid it – here is our take:
http://www.liquidplanner.com/Articles/-Multi-Ta…

i have a similar issue with multi tasking. the project is broken up into major tasks of Coding,QA,release to BETA, release to FINAL. this is concerning changing software. the coding is assigned and estimated. qa starts when the coding is complete. beta starts when QA is complete and release to FINAL starts when BETA test is complete. everything works except the BETA stage. this is when the software is release to a few users for 2 weeks. so i estimate the time to be 10 days and assign the project mgr the task to move software to beta stage. the movement of software takes 1 hour but the task takes 2 weeks. when i create the task and assign to a person, that person is assumed to be unavailable for 2 weeks which is not the case. during that 2 weeks the person i assigned is on to other tasks. how do i setup this scenario?
thanks

If I understand this correctly, your BETA phase is a fixed amount of time. What I recommend is that you create a virtual member called beta-users. Create a task in your beta project container called External Testing and assign it to beta-users with an estimate of 10-10 days (no uncertainty). Drop a second task in for your project manager estimated at an hour (or 0.1 – 0.2 to acknowledge there may be uncertainty).

Setting Delay Until for the project containers or making the projects depend on each other probably completes the model as expected.

Let us know how that works for you.

- Charles.

The answer you are giving is what i was afraid you would say. i dont consider this to be an adequate workaround. i went into my workpace and had to create 3 dummy users to solve the issue. There needs to be a simple checkbox on the task that the assigned person is available for other work during this period. i have seen this solution on other proj mgmt systems. I will keep checking to see when an adequate solution is implemented.

I have a related question. How can I bridge my current users and virtual users to a new workspace. Currently the only way I see to do it is to send an email invite. Anyway to tie these?

@mitch – I’m not exactly sure what you are trying to do. Each account that is created gets a default workspace named after the person. Typically groups don’t use all these default spaces, insteal one person sets up a common workspace and invites all the team members to it using the “invite members” button. This person will effectively be the admin for the workspace and control the members list.

It’s good to have everyone in one space because the scheduler will consider everyone’s tasks/availability when flowing out work.

If you have work you want to move from one space to another, use our export/import functionality. You can find Export by clicking on the actions menu button (under advanced). Import is under the add menu button. For best results, invite everyone to the new workspace before importing.

If you want to transfer ownership of the space to someone else, contact support@liquidplanner.com.

Let me know if you need more help,
Charles.

@Charles – Thanks for the quick response. We have multiple development teams that are working on different projects. However depending on project people can switch from team to team. In my scenario it would be easier to be able to have a list of all users then assign them to a workspace or all workspaces.

@mitch – workspaces are meant to be secure sandboxes where most of the time the whole organization is in one workspace with multiple projects so that scheduling can occur across the projects. We currently follow an open edit model where everyone in the space can see everything.

We understand that some organizations such as professional service organizations with multiple clients want both isolation of project data AND scheduling across projects. We are thinking about this problem and soliciting input from the user community. Please let us know if you have specific interests in this area.

Thanks much.

I really started liking this project, but then I got to what you guys spin as smart and I spin as very limiting…. If I am assigned to a task that take 1 to 3 days (for example) that does not mean that is the only thing I will be able to get done in that time period. That same 1 to 3 days I can multi task and get multiple things done all due in that same 1 to 3 days. The way this software appears to work is that I have to do everything Serially (regardless of dependencies). No dependencies and I still cannot work on several things at the same time WHICH I DO… This is really a severe limitation… I will drop the product unless I can get a good answer—thank you, jbrowning@ybsilent.com

J – thanks for writing.

LiquidPlanner flows work out by chaining tasks end-to-end based first on the order of the tasks while respecting constraints you add on the “scheduling” and “dependencies” tabs.

The system does not know how you are going to jump around on your tasks, so as you found out, it assumes you work serially. The downside of this is that if you have four tasks the system says the first one will be done earlier then you know you it will be (because you know you’ll interrupt yourself to work on something else). You could imagine trying to tell the software you’ll work on each1/4 of the time but that is pretty cumbersome to keep accurate and we don’t support it at present.

Fortunately, there is an easier, more flexible way.

• Task A, 1-3 days
• Task B, 1-3 days
• Task C, 1-3 days
• Task D, 1-3 days

What I suggest is that you create a container for those tasks like this:

• In Progress [ 6-10 days ]
  • Task A, 1-3 days
  • Task B, 1-3 days
  • Task C, 1-3 days
  • Task D, 1-3 days

Use this container to keep hold of the things you are multi-tasking on right now; the schedule roll up on the parent will always tell you the safe promise date for the total set of work. If you are truly multi-tasking, you probably should not promise anything earlier. You might even want to set a promise date on the container to so that you will be alerted if any of the tasks become “at risk” (won’t meet the promise date.)

Set up other project containers for future work and drag things into the In Progress Container when you are ready to start (mix them in). Basically ignore the end dates on the individual tasks in In Progress, and focus on the set (since you jump around anyway).

Bottom line: if you multi-task heavily, you need a fuzzy, flexible structure.

Here is a related post with another community member asking a similar question:
http://www.liquidplanner.com/forums/forums/9/to…

Prioritizing work is a best practice and multitasking is hard to avoid. We can offer some reasons for doing less multitasking in this article: Multi-tasking is killing your business

Unfortunately, this is a show-stopper for me. I really like your environment although we do rely on milestone dates quite a bit which isn’t quite the “liquidplanner” way. But being a product manager for a software company, I’m managing resources across multiple teams and multiple projects, in which simultaneous tasks is a must (and it is not killing our business but making it viable). If you should decide to allow percentages to be applied to individuals, that would be great. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing my work with Fasttrack Scheduler.

Thanks John. If we added support for “percent effort applied to people”, how would you like to see that work?

-Charles.
[question is open to anyone following the topic; we are looking at this as a feature]

I’ve been struggling with this issue myself since using LP. I’ve read the blogs about avoiding multitasking and the posts on ways to simulate multitasking in LP and still found myself wishing for multitasking. But I think that I may have reached a eureka moment.

Most of the posts I’ve seen and from my own experience there are two principal reasons that people want to multitask.
1. A task takes a fixed period of time to complete but requires very little effort for the assigned resource to do the task. An example of this type of task is an automated QA tests. It takes an hour to set up the test and the 3 days for the test to run. If I have multiple tests then simply scheduling the tests for 3.125 hours results in my schedule requiring 3.125 * N (where N is the number of tests) days to complete.
2. I have several tasks that need to be completed in 3 days. I want to put them all into LP so that I can track them. I schedule each for 3 days (or perhaps I use an estimated range. LP then schedules these sequential which again leaves me with an incorrect schedule.

In reality there are two different issues here. In other project systems these are all treated the same. I just schedule them as multitasked items and the project software plans accordingly. However LP is different (which is a good thing). With LP you need to treat these two cases as separate cases.

For the first case I mention above (small amount of up front work, long duration task) I think LP needs an easy way to express this. It can be done with virtual users but this get very cumbersome very quickly. What I’m really trying to capture here is two items both belonging to the same resource. One item is real effort and the other is just calendar time. What if LP had a method to enter that information. I’m not sure if this should be a new tab or just another entry on the work tab but the idea is that it would be a value that I can enter that the scheduler would use to set an end date for the task but not schedule the person’s time for this period. Only the effort portion (the 1 hour) would be scheduled. All this would be associated with the single task. For example:
Run QA Test 1 (0.1 – 0.2) (2 – 3) (stevew)
Run QA Test 2 (0.1 – 0.2) (3 – 3) (stevew)
The scheduler would schedule the two tasks. My time is scheduled for 0.2 to 0.4 days but the first task runs for 2 to 3 days (we have some test that take variable amount of time) and the second takes 3 days (plus the task overhead of 0.1 to 0.2 days). It doesn’t start until 0.1 – 0.2 days after the first task starts. I’m not quite sure how this would be expressed on the schedule but I’m sure it could be done. When I create dependencies it would be on the full task duration.

• Multitask Project (3-9 days)
  • Task A (1 – 3 days)
  • Task B (1 – 3 days)
  • Task C (1 – 3 days)

• Multitask Project (1 – 3 days)
  • Task A (0.3 – 1 days)
  • Task B (0.3 – 1 days)
  • Task C (0.3 – 1 days)

The mistake is that each task must only be talking 1/3 the total time or the user can’t complete them in the 3 days indicated. Now the problem comes in that LP also tries to advance the schedule by automatically applying progress if the user hasn’t. In this case automatic progress should probably be applied to all three tasks equally. Perhaps the project could have a check box to indicate that auto-progress should be split across all sub tasks. I suspect the another issue is the term project – users might not consider this to be a project but a set of tasks that all start at the same time. So I think that with a minor tweak to the auto-progress LP might be able to handle this situation fairly elegantly, it might just take some getting used to by the users.

Hi Steve, I wanted to say thanks for the long post; I’ve read it a couple of times and need to come back to it. We’ve been pretty busy around here getting ready for the next release.