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Hi, I'd like to let everyone know I've looked at a number of free planning applications including ganttproject, jxproject, dotproject and more and where Planner wins is in the quality of its graphical display and, in particular, its zoomable Gantt chart, which must be invaluable for large projects consisting of many subprojects spanning long time periods. Planner has lots of potential. But for my requirement - a large project spanning a year's timeframe comprising many subprojects - Planner may have some drawbacks. Here's one - unless I'm missing something here. I've entered two tasks into Planner (deb package 0.12.1-1). They both have a constraint type of "as soon as possible" and duration of 1 day. They both consume 100% of my resources. i.e.
Yet Planner calculates the start date for both tasks to be the same. I realise I have entered no dependencies between them but clearly they can't both happen on the same day. I expect this is not a bug but intended behaviour. However, to the uninitiated end-user like myself, it seems counter-intuitive and unhelpful because Planner doesn't seem to have scheduled the second task "as soon as possible" but instead it seems to have unfortunately scheduled both tasks to be impossible(!) I can see how the Resource Usage chart highlights in red the overlap of resources and the need for manual intervention. But, if I have a lot of tasks in Planner, I fear it would require frequent and lengthy manual intervention to adjust lots of start dates whenever such a problem occurs. Maybe I'm missing something but, assuming I'm not, I can suggest some approach to making this behaviour more intuitive. Planner's "as soon as possible" constraint could: a. put the affected tasks in some arbitrary order and auto-calculate the start and end dates accordingly. After all, if you haven't specified an order of dependency then doesn't it mean it doesn't matter which order they come in? The overlapping use of resources could be seen to constitute a virtual dependency between tasks (albeit one where no explicit order is specified)? Planner could give overlapping tasks a default dependency e.g. to schedule the dates of the later-entered task to follow the dates of the earlier-entered task. Then Planner would show it thus:
b. leave the start dates of all affected tasks unchanged but make all their end-dates the same date, auto-calculated as if the resource were being divided on an ad-hoc basis between simultaneous tasks. Then Planner would show it thus:
IMHO, either (a) or (b) would be more intuitive and useful with large projects than relying on human intervention to either add unnecessary dependencies or change start and end dates by hand. Have I missed the point? Is this feedback helpful? Kind regards, Struan Bartlett. |