User Forum > Use Case
Hi Mark,
This question is complicated enough that I think we should tackle it through support rather than the forums; I'll send you an email to kick that off.
In short, you can approach this by combining several features and then using Excel for the budget analysis.
You can use a LP Ratesheet to load the $$$ rates for your team. You can set different rates per client, per project, per person, and per activity.
Via the members tab you can increase peoples availability to say, 6 days a week, and then create vacation events if they are *not* going to work on the weekend.
You can use activity codes to assign specific rates to tasks or let the system default to a person's standard rate.
You can set promise dates on any item in the system, if you do this on a container it will be inherited by the items in it.
You can use the LP data export features to do analysis in Excel. We can provide you with a Baseline template and Forecast template we built in Excel that uses LP data (requires medium level Excel skills).
Charles.
Charles Seybold
I have a use case that may not be applicable to LiquidPlanner. I work at a law firm and I am trying to manage legal cases. In this situation we have promised the client a fixed price for a given case (say $25,000). This is based on listing all of the necessary tasks, projecting the amount of time (hours) per task, and assigning attorneys at different billing rates to those tasks. Although deadlines are important for certain tasks, from a project mgmt perspective, I am more concerned with hours billed than with dates. (Also, our attorneys can work VERY long hours, 10 to 16, so they are not governed by an 8 hour per day type of limit and they often work weekends.)
When I put together my project plan, I want the focus to be estimated hours and billed hours per task, with less focus on what gets done when. When I put an hours estimate into a task, however, LP translates those hours into a schedule, based on hours per day worked with weekends off. I realize I can change those assumptions, but it's not always the same for every attorney.
I would rather indicate for each task: # of hours estimate and, optionally, a due date. (Dependencies too.) Can LiquidPlanner work in this context?
I will skip my follow up question, as I don't believe it's available yet, but I want to be able to do budget comparison: projected vs actual, based on tasks, hours assigned and billing rates.