Teams as Task Owner

I need to be able to setup teams as task owner.
At the moment I can only setup a member as task owner and that will be a dependency for other tasks.
I would like to be able to setup virtual members which are teams with an availability of 20 days per week (means 4 people working in that team).

Is this something which LiquidPlanner has on its radar or is there a solution I haven’t found yet?

Hi Rolli – that’s a good question. We don’t support it now, but our dev team has been talking about it. The virtual member is a good route, but as you discovered VMs assume one person’s availability. One route is to allow 20 days a week as you’ve suggested, which is pretty straight forward. We’ve also talked about turning the member list into an organizational tree. As you might imagine, that would have some additional management and reporting benefits. I’ll take your post back to the dev team so they know it’s being asked for.

If I might suggest a hack (in the truest sense of the word) until we support this, create a virtual resource and label it something like this: Test Team (4x)

When you estimate work for the Test Team, just enter an effort estimate that is the work for one person on the team. For example if you anticipated 20-40 days of total work, enter 5-10 days of work. This will of course under count on the total remaining work estimate but the schedule will be roughly right.

Lastly (as I’m sure you probably know), this technique is at best only good for roughing out a schedule since different people work on tasks at different rates and often can not perfectly work in sync. I recommend keeping your ranges wider if you use this technique to capture that uncertainty.

Thanks,
Charles.