Prioritizing Projects & Tasks

Prioritizing Projects & Tasks

When looking at the projects view in LiquidPlanner the list of projects that you see are in priority order. (The order in the category view doesn’t affect schedule or priority at all.)

The projects at the top of the list are prioritized ahead of the projects farther down the list. But this really only matters if the projects share resources.

For example, if there are two projects (call them “Party” and “Clean Out Garage”) and they share no resources, then each of them is the top priority for their respective resources (Albert and Betty). So they both get scheduled ASAP and changing the order of the two projects has no effect on the schedule.

Here’s what the schedule looks like to start with…

Now I’ll drag and drop the “Party” project below the “Clean Out Garage” project.

You can see the while the order in the list has changed, the schedules for each project have not. This is because Albert is the only person working on the party, while Betty is the only person working on cleaning out the garage. The projects have no resources in common.

Now let’s say (realistically) that Albert knows that after the party he’s going to be hung-over like a sailor after a three day leave in Bangkok. So Betty graciously agrees to take over the “Clean up after Party” sub-project.

I’ve re-assigned the tasks to Betty and now the Party project looks like this…

Now when we change the priority of the two projects we see that the schedule changes significantly. That’s because Betty can’t be double-booked and LiquidPlanner knows it. So when the garage is highest priority her party work gets pushed out.

When the party is highest priority the garage work gets pushed out.

Poor Betty, always cleaning. But at least she isn’t hung-over like Albert.

See also:
Projects & Categories