posts that wingerrb is monitoring

Topic: Recurring Meetings

We’ll be adding support for dependencies in the duplicate function in a upcoming release. Looking at our schedule, it may make it into the August 08 update; if not, then the September 08 update.

Topic: Recurring Meetings

The “create duplicate project” is very useful – we have quarterly financial reporting requirement for a number of our businesses. However, the copy & paste does not seem to take the dependencies along with it. How can I fix that?

Topic: Displaying stats by who requested an item

@ wingerrb:

Another thing to consider – if the person who creates an item knows who made the reqeust, that could always be noted in the short description.

Topic: Displaying stats by who requested an item

I have been thinking of some generalized mechanism for marking interest in items. I think if we do that, and then generate a report of those items, it should provide the functionality you are looking for.

If you’re interested, I could send you some previews of what we’re working on once we start redesigning the dashboard.

Topic: Displaying stats by who requested an item

I rather like that idea. We’re looking at revising the dashboard some time soon, so I’ll keep this in mind.

As a side note, if you want to see who created an item, go to the estimates tab, and then click: actions >> advanced options >> customize columns… From there you can turn on some columns we don’t show by default. You can also reorder the columns, I always move ‘created by’ right up next to ‘owner’.

That way I can see who is opening new work for me ;)

• Customizing Columns

Topic: Tracking of changes in order sub-projects or tasks

That’s a great point. More generally you’re looking to see if someone else has altered your schedule, right?

So towards this, we’re working on email reports you will be able to subscribe to on a daily or weekly basis to get your upcoming tasks (like you do on the dashboard). This should help.

I’ll put some thought into a more specific report that might show the changes in priority of items over time. I think there is something that can be done here.

Topic: Recurring Meetings

@wingerrb – I think tastes differ on this for sure, but my take on it is that recurring tasks are like recurring meetings for one person. They are part of your over head. I put them on my calendar.

If you want the task to be part of the plan, that’s a different story. Ultimately we’ll probably add that feature but we don’t have it now (it’s actually a fairly tricky one to build right). If you don’t have to have a specific line item in the plan for the task, then either bake the overhead into estimates of related work or reduce your availability to something like 4 days a week instead of 5 and assume you lose a day a week to general over head.

If you need the line item as a reminder and to track actual work, you could just leave a single task open (non marked done) with no estimate and log time to it as you work on it.

Lastly, you could duplicate the task over and over but, I don’t recommend that until we release our item duplicate feature; it will also clutter up your plan.

Planning scenarios differ; I generally recommend the simplest model of the work you can have and make sure you estimate in realistic ranges.

Topic: Space compared to Project / Tabs

In a couple of weeks we’ll have the next update rolled out and the first thing you will see is that we cleaned the tabs up; no more double layer.

Spaces (or more formally Workspaces) are collections of projects. In LiquidPlanner you can set up as many spaces as you like and each space can have as many projects and sub-projects as you like. You can invite members to each and any space; only the members can see and participate in the space.

When a person creates an account, they get a default space with thier name. If they decide to just work in your space, they can delete the automatically created one.

Currently the dashboard only let’s you look at one space at a time. We did this so that people who work with multiple companies (consultants) could open thier dashboard in the presence of a customer and not have to worry that one client will see another clients information.

Eventually, we will provide support for you to see accross all your spaces at one time.

Topic: Recurring Meetings

My advice Jon, is don’t even try. That is what calendars are for and adding them will just serve to clutter up your plan. We recommend baking overhead into your estimates. Everybody has a certian amount of overhead in their work like regular meetings and reading email. Our advice is to just factor that in when you estimate by basing your estimates on realistic days, not ideal work days.

The other thing to do is make sure you make your ranged estimates wide enough to capture the realistic uncertianty in your environment. The most common thing people do when they first start estimating in ranges is to make the ranges to narrow. Don’t try to be too precise.

Another thing you might do is create some supporting tasks for unplanned stuff that is unestimated, but there if you want to track against it; for example, “Sales Team Support” might linger in an engineering plan and people can track time against it if it comes up.

On our team we also do some interesting stuff with prioritized project folders that model our process. You might find my blog post on it interesting:
http://www.liquidplanner.com/blog/?p=45

Thanks for participating in our beta!

Topic: Recurring Meetings

Is there a way to set up a recurring meeting? How would I enter a status meeting that occurs every Friday from 9:00 to 10:00 for the next year?