posts that Duncan is monitoring

Topic: How do I enter an estimate for a task that may only take me a few hours to complete?

Right now we treat a day as 8 hours. However, we’re aware that several of our customers would like units other than days. We’re going to be building this functionality in a future release. Hopefully you can work with days until then.

Thanks,
Jason

Topic: How do I enter an estimate for a task that may only take me a few hours to complete?

I guess when you mention hours, you consider only working hours right? so how many is that? 8, 10, 12 per day? i am trying to figure out wheter 0.5d = 12h or not.
i just got using LP and my very 1st impression is that i would find it very useful planning in more detailed units than days.
thanks for the reply

Topic: Resource Scheduling

I think DL is asking for a way to model multi-tasking. Philosophically I think multi-tasking is evil but also a reality of life (must read blog: http://brucebrain.blogspot.com/2007/09/multi-ta…)

That said, here is how we think of it. At any point in time, a worker is facing a prioritized set of tasks and some promise dates. Suppose today my task list looks like this:

- High Priority task 5-10 days
- Med Priority task 3-5 days
- Low Priority review 1-2 days due in 2 weeks

Nobody really cares when these happen or if they are multitasked, what they care about is WHEN they will be done. The best practice is to just prioritize and work in priority order but people get blocked.

They way to handle this is to set your promise dates on a higher level container (plan around a package of work).

If you expect multitasking and these tasks are of equal priority then handle it this way – put the competing priorities into a project container which will give you the rollup schedule for getting all three done. Use the roll up date as the promise date of all three items. It sounds a little strange, because the promise date will be far to the right of the highest priority task, but if you really are saying they are of equal priority and you will multi-task, that is the right promise date.

Multitask Stuff
- High Priority task 5-10 days
- Med Priority task 3-5 days
- Low Priority review 1-2 days due in 2 weeks

This aspect of scheduling is why LiquidPlanner separates schedule dates (eg Expected Exit) from promise dates. Promise dates are commitments.

Also remember if you get blocked and jump down to a low priority task for a day, the schedule engine catchs this and will ask the person to true up the progress on the high priority task; it’s a living schedule.

I hope this is useful.

Topic: Resource Scheduling

The way you would model this is to adjust a person’s availability.

Go to the members section of your space (it’s the icon that looks like two people up at the top), and then set the availability of each person. We assume 5 day work weeks, but if they are working less, you can adjust accordingly.

Does that help?

Topic: Resource Scheduling

I have to throw my support behind this idea as well. I’m trying to schedule work on multiple projects for several people but at no time is any one of them 100% dedicated to a task (particularly evaluations). I don’t see how to give an estimate for a task, but say that the resource will only be working on it 20% of the time.

Topic: Resource Scheduling

These are certainly interesting use cases. I’ll talk to some of the other folks here and see how we would handle this.

Topic: How do I enter an estimate for a task that may only take me a few hours to complete?

How do I enter an estimate for a task that may only take me a few hours to complete?

In LiquidPlanner we use days as the basic unit. If you think it will take you half a day, use 0.5 days.

When entering small task, I ask myself “how many of these could I do in a day?” If it’s something that should take a quarter of my day, I’ll give it a ranged estimate of something like .2 to .4 days. The smallest unit you can use is .01 days, which is about five minutes.