Handling interruptions

I was wondering if there were any recommendations on how to handle interruptions when working on a task?

For example, I’m working on Task A that is expected to take 5 days. On day 2 a bug in an older release is discovered that requires patching. I spend 3 days on that (Task B). The net effect is that Task A takes 8 days instead of 5.

Would you just override the automatic progress amount for Task A (force it to 2 days for the 3 days I’m working on Task B)?

OR

Would you add another task for Task B and maybe break Task A into 2 separate tasks to give you something like:

 Task A-part1
 ------------------Task B
 -----------------------------Task A-part2

Any suggestions?

Thanks
John

That may depend on how your company bills time, but it doesn’t matter from a strictly scheduling perspective. The unplanned interruptions need to be factored into planning, one way or another. The easiest way is to factor them in as part of the time it takes to complete Task A. That is: you estimate that Task A should take so many days, but due to the PM environment where you work (interruptions) it will actually take sixty percent longer. This way you avoid the hassle of having to add unplanned interruptions to your schedule, ensure that all activities that your resources are working on are scheduled, and split tasks in progress. That said, there is an upside to adding everything to the schedule and splitting activities in progress: you can more easily show the negative impact of all of those interruptions, and possibly affect a cultural change to eliminate interruptions.

It would be great if LiquidPlanner evolves to the point where these differences between estimated duration and actual duration, as tracked for each resource, are factored into future probabilistic schedules. In other words, Resource A’s estimates average 60% low, so a task assigned to Resource A has 60% added to the probabilistic calculation of duration (you could even take this a step further and add the probability distribution based on past actual – estimate differences).

Thanks for the suggestions tom. I’ve evaluated other PM tools that factor in past estimation accuracy (aka evidence based estimating) and it seems very useful, but there’s always some other issue that makes using those tools too difficult.

I have a similar thing but slightly different. Let’s say I have 4 tasks A, B, C and D. D is longer than A+B and C is my vacation (fixed date). The order is A->B->D and between B and C there less time than necessary to complete D. Currently LP will schedule D after my vacation C. Couldn’t it automatically split the tasks in 2 parts?

Thanks,
Manu

In our next release which will be out shortly (< 2 weeks), we have a solution for this.

What you’ll do is take C (the vacation) and set the Delay Until setting (Edit Details panel, Scheduling tab) to the first day of the vacation (or meeting, or fixed event). Set the estimate for C to be 5-5 days (assuming one week vacation). The portion of D that can be done before the vacation will flow forward in time to fill any gap. This task is effectively split around the vacation but will show up as a single bar.