Re: [Planner Dev] MS Project "red flag"

[Mark Durrenberger <m durrenberger comcast net>]

At 07:13 PM 2/16/2004, you wrote:
> ons 2004-02-11 klockan 20.32 skrev Mark Durrenberger:
>
> Hi Mark!
>
> First off, thanks for great input and sorry I haven't had timet o reply
> before today.
>
> I think you make a very valid point here and this is something that has
> always been one of the reasons I don't like these kind of tools myself.
> They give you a fairly inaccurate view of the project (at best).
>
> So, what you suggest is that we have Effort and Duration (I agree that
> Effort is a much better term than Work).

cool. Glad you like the term. I've used it for years it's in all our 
training material
a fairly well understood idea even in the PMBOK guide (Project management 
body of knowledge guide)


> Effort is meassured in
> "staff-hours/staff-days" to avoid confusion with the Duration that is
> measured in hours/days.


Yes I believe it is important to be clear about units - can't tell you how 
often effort and duration get confused and how much the units help avoid 
the confusion.



> The two aren't by default linked together but
> the user can chose to link them

I'm having a tough time coming up with good reasons to link effort and 
duration but  I can't rule it out for others. So it might be a feature some 
(former MSP users) would look for - is that justification enough to include 
it?

> and when doing that also specify how
> they should change (fixed duration, fixed work etc, or is this not
> useful if we do it like this?).

Assuming it makes sense to include the feature set, it might be more 
meaningful to users if the terminology was different. Here is a proposal:

User selects a task flag "link effort and duration" once this flag is 
toggled, then they are presented with three additional "check boxes"

"Keep duration constant" (is that better than "fixed duration"?) (default)
"Keep effort constant"
"keep allocation % constant" (please don't use "units")

Or another way to think of this (but not a better way to say it)

"Effort" and "Allocation %" are a function of "Duration"
Duration and Allocation % are a function of Effort
Duration and Effort are a function of Allocation %


> To me this sounds like a pretty good idea.

Again, happy to help and glad you like it. Love to get more feedback/push 
back from others...

on another note:

I've been thinking a lot about my own linux/ Gnu/ C learning curve and am 
trying to figure out what in my life I can/want to ignore so I'll have time 
to learn... doesn't look good. I feel a bit guilty "throwing out" ideas and 
not helping with the heavy lifting...

Can you tell me about dual booting - could I set my laptop (Dell) with a 
40GB drive up to run both win2k and Linux (how much space would I need to 
give to linux) - which version of linux (red had, FreeBSD...) do you recommend?

Thanks,
Mark



> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal
>
> Imendio HB, http://www.imendio.com/
>
>
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                                                 Kin Hubbard