Re: [Planner Dev] Re: Concise view of tasks

[Kurt Maute <Kurt Maute us>]

On Mon, 2004-07-19 at 21:31, Brian Christensen wrote:
> Kurt commented:
> 
> > Finally, I've always struggled with a good way to get MSP to show me a
> > concise view of what tasks should be active in the current and next 
> > week
> > or so.  In other words, I've got to manually scan down my plan for 
> > tasks
> > that should have started already or are about to start, and tasks that
> > should have finished already or should be finished soon.  This is a
> > special pain with larger plans.  I'm not sure if this would need to be 
> > a
> > separate view, or a variation of the view you're proposing.
> 
> What size of window do you think this should be? Two weeks back and 
> four weeks forward?  Or perhaps based on a percentage of the project's 
> total duration? Is it something that the project manager should set 
> once and forget about? Or something that will change from week to week?
> 
> Really what I am trying to get a better handle on is: what specific 
> criteria would you use to define the "concise view" of tasks that you 
> would like to see?

Ok, Great!

For starters, how many weeks back shouldn't be an issue.  What I'd want
to show is any task that is either late to start or late to finish:
Late to start if %complete = 0 and start date < view date
Late to finish if %complete < 100 and finish date < view date

In general, I want to see information on:
1) What tasks are late to start/finish as of a date in the current week
so I can look forward and anticipate what my project will look like on
my weekly report.
2) What tasks are scheduled to start/finish as of a date in the future,
usually for the next week out so I can prepare.  This is essentially the
same logic as above, we're just pushing the view date out further.
3) Tasks currently being worked

At a bare minimum, the view would be usable by implementing #1 with a
single view date.  The user would be able to set the date further in the
future to get a view of all tasks the must start/finish by that date and
get the gist of what I'm looking for in #2, but it seems that it
shouldn't be too much more trouble to show both at the same time.

I'm thinking the layout might look something like this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Date: 07/23/04 | Future Date: 07/30/04 | OTS: 50% | OTF: 0%
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Status|%Cmplt| WBS | Task                  |  Start  | Finish |Work|
Pred
------------------------------------------------------------------------
        |  4%   | 3.0 | New Hardware       |07/19/04|08/22/04|      | 
LTF    | 50%   | 3.1 |   Get Quote         |07/19/04|07/19/04| 4   | 
LTS    |  0%   | 3.2 |   Get Approval      |07/21/04|07/21/04| 8   | 3.1
STS    |  0%   | 3.3 |   Order Hardware   |07/26/04|07/26/04| 2   | 3.2

Date format is mm/dd/yy

'New Hardware' is a summary task.  There are additional subtasks under
this summary (receive hardware, install, configure, etc.) that don't
show up on this view because they're not late and not scheduled to be
worked yet (>Future Date).  The status column shows the following
possible values:
LTS = Late to Start
LTF = Late to Finish
STS = Scheduled to Start
STF = Scheduled to Finish

It might be a good idea to get some colors going in this view to help
quickly identify the status.
LTS = Yellow
LTF = Red
STS = Green
STF = ??

'New Hardware' could be on there either because its a summary task or
because its currently being worked.  I think its important to show
summary tasks related to any tasks on the report, otherwise it could be
difficult to figure out what the task is pertaining to without switching
back and forth between views.

View Options:
  Show LTS/LTF
  Show STS/STF
  Show Active Tasks
  Show Summary Tasks

The user should be able to set any or all of the view options to
customize the display.

I have OTS% (on time start %) and OTF% (on time finish %) at the top of
the screen, but it might also be helpful to add columns for them, which
would give the user the ability to quickly assess where the project may
be slipping (not that any of our projects ever do - right?).

That's the basic idea of what I'd be looking for.  This view would allow
the PM to quickly and clearly see what's happening now, what's should be
happening now but isn't, and what needs to be worked on soon.

-- 
Kurt Maute <Kurt Maute us>