Re: [Planner] Tasks assigned to same resource scheduled concurrently?

[Santiago Erquicia <santiago_erquicia yahoo com ar>]

Roberto Leibman wrote:

> <rant>
> It's funny that what's perfectly obvious to someone new to project 
> management is ignored by most experts.
>
> I have to agree with Josep that any tool that does project management 
> has to make resource constraints a first-order problem, and not an 
> afterthought. I've yet to see any widely used tool that does this; 
> Primavera, MS Project, etc don't do it, they all require you to go 
> through hoops to do resource leveling and most of the time you end up 
> having to create artificial temporal dependencies such as the 
> suggestion given to Josep. These dependencies are at best a 
> workaround, but in practice they can be detrimental to the project 
> because they obscure the possibility of doing tasks in parallel by the 
> "simple" addition of resources to a task, in practice, as the project 
> progresses you figure out that the link is artificial and often end up 
> doing the task in parallel anyway, thereby throwing your hands in the 
> air and saying: "screw this project plan", or even worse, spending 
> another couple of hours redoing the whole thing (and then an hour's 
> meeting explaining the "new and improved" project plan to the team.
>
> Which is why there exist better methodologies than Critical Path 
> analysis (yeah, I know, I repeat myself) such as Critical Chain 
> management, that take into account resource constraints from the 
> beginning.
> </rant>

Critical Chain is easier to solve than what you are asking for.  CC 
forces you to set a fixed schedule that you set up manually taking into 
account resources.  At least that's the case with the original book from 
Goldratt.

Solving resource constrained projects optimally is not an easy task.  I 
don't know if I would like to have something that "magically" changes my 
schedule without knowing what's going on.  Most of the times the network 
changes so much that you don't know what happened.  Maybe an option is 
to use resource relationships with a different color but there are many 
cases that would be hard to simulate.

Santiago