[Planner Dev] MS Project "red flag"

[Mark Durrenberger <m durrenberger comcast net>]

The resource management tools in MS Project are a pain in the neck at best 
and dangerous at worse - primarily because of the assumptions the 
developers made and poor terminology they used while implementing 
-  hopefully the explanations below will keep you from making the same 
mistakes... (Pardon me if my tone is a bit "pompous" this topic is 
important to me and I have strong views - so if you'll allow me to "rant" 
for a moment...)

First some background:

Effort - the number of labor hours (days, weeks) required to accomplish a 
project activity. A consultant usually bills on his or her effort - so 
think of "how many hours would I have to pay a consultant to do this work"

Duration - the number of days (weeks) that it takes to complete a project 
activity. 1 week is typically thought of as five days of duration.

Example 1: A consultant might say - well that's about 35 hours worth of 
work and I can have it for you a week from Friday. So the task is 35 hours 
of effort and 9 days of duration. (Thursday, Friday, and Monday through 
Friday of the next week assuming we are not counting weekends)

Example 2: I am creating a 1/2 day course for a client.  It takes me about 
6 hours of effort to pull together the slides for the course. However 
accounting for interruptions (e-mails like these) it will take a day to 
complete the task (to make it easy, I usually think of effort in 
staff-hours (man-hours) and duration in days this helps avoid the confusion 
of units.)

Now the "wrong way" to do this :-)  (Microsoft Project MSP for short)

MSP  calls effort "Work." Work is ambiguous. Effort is better.
MSP uses units of hours or days - neither is sufficient man-hours (days) is 
better, staff-hours (days) is even better (out of respect for the working 
women in the world)

In MSP, Once you have assigned a resource to an activity in the effort and 
duration become "linked" that is, if you change the duration of the task, 
MSP recalculates the effort (Work). Change the effort and MSP recalculates 
the duration - the assumption is 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week unless 
you change the default values or change the calendar for the assigned resource.

Why this is wrong - In theory, effort and duration should be linked. In 
practice they never are (8 years now, I've never seen it work, and I look). 
People don't use the resource allocation tools in MSP because changes in 
duration cause changes in effort. I believe the primary reason that people 
don't want the two linked is "time slicing." Most organizations have too 
many projects, so people have to switch from project to project on a 
regular basis. MSP says 40 hours effort = 5 days duration. Reality says 
"never happen" (well in the rare case that someone is 100% on one project 
it *might* happen. To see why I say this answer this question: "How many 
hours must I work in a day to get 8 productive hours?" I'm guessing your 
answer will be somewhere between 10 and 12 depending on the nature of your 
job.)

When people plan projects, they factor in the interruptions but don't 
express them as allocation percent. Like the consultant example above, 
they'll tell you 35 hours, 9 days (FYI that's 48.6% allocation assuming 8 
hours a day) so why force it. Just take the data ...

Some Work Arounds in MSP

1) Don't assign resources - Until you assign resources effort and duration 
are not linked. (Instead create a column called "Accountable" and put names 
in the accountable field. However, then it's hard to determine how many 
hours each accountable person is assigned)

Use the built in flags:
"Fixed Duration"  - changing the effort does not change the duration,
"Fixed Work" - changing the duration does not change the effort.
"Fixed Units" - changes in either duration or effort does not change the % 
allocation (no matter how long the duration or how large the effort, the % 
allocation stays the same - so MSP tweaks the others)

The flags help but if you change the work on a fixed work task, the 
duration will change and if you change duration on a fixed duration task, 
the work will change

(FYI "Units" should be called "allocation percent" or "percent allocated" )

Effort and duration should, by default, be unlinked. Give the user the 
option to link the two (I'm betting most will not).

Does this make sense?
I can expand any point.

Next topic - estimating effort vs. duration

Regards,
Mark



At 12:18 PM 2/11/2004, you wrote:

> I too noticed defining resources wasn't easy at first.
> As a quick fix for next release of Planner can I
> suggest a simple button/menu of "Allocate Resources"
>
> Thus you could ctrl/shift-click multiple tasks (well
> actually I've found up to 31 or 32 only !) and then
> click/menu the "Allocate resources" option.
>
> Something like the existing Resource display would be
> presented but existing allocations would be presented
> in the typical (true for GNOME ?) three-state
> convention of Checked , Not Checked and Inconsistent
> based on all the resource allocations of all the
> selected tasks.
>
> Thus you could easily add/remove a resource and adjust
> its units allocation but keep existing allocations
> unchanged, across all the selected tasks at once.
>
> Does that sound OK ?. I can look at this as I've finished
> my "Link" button change and this change would be a nice
> incrementally more difficult task for me. I won't be
> able to do a drag-n-drop as that would be too hard
> (my guess).
>
> OK for this ?
>
> Rgds,
> Lincoln.
>
> (After that we'd need a easy way of setting completion
> percentage for many tasks ;)
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