Virtual Teams

If you use LiquidPlanner, you already know about Virtual Members, the super-handy placeholder for tasks that you don’t want to assign to real workspace members.  Planners often use these for new hires, outside contractors, etc.

Suppose you use an outside testing service and they promise you 5 full-time contractors.  You might create 5 virtual members to represent them and maintain a bunch of individual tasks for each.  But in many cases this detail is abstracted by the sub-contractor and not worth the plan clutter just to get a reasonable size block on the schedule.

That’s where Virtual Teams come in.  Now you can create a single virtual member with the strength of 5 (or 3, or 7.5, or 2) just by tacking a special suffix onto the end of the member name.

For example, replace these 5 virtual members:

•    Contract Worker #1
•    Contract Worker #2
•    Contract Worker #3
•    Contract Worker #4
•    Contract Worker #5

With just one virtual member with the (@x5) suffix added to the name:

•    Contract Worker (@x5)

Doing this means any task assigned to this owner will get done 5 times faster. 

A word of caution: use this feature thoughtfully because it will let you make a baby in 1 month by creating  a resource called Moms (@x9).  It is best used for long range planning where tasks can be load-balanced and the dependencies are few.