Re: [Planner] Handling "As soon as possible" constraint in context of over-booked resource

["Stephen J. Gowdy" <gowdy slac stanford edu>]

Can't you get get that person to work 16 hours that day? FWIW I think the
non-free version of project management would do the same as planner does.

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Struan Bartlett wrote:

> 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.
>
> WBS
> 	Name
> 	Start
> 	Finish
> 	Work
> 1
> 	Item A
> 	Mar 21
> 	Mar 21
> 	1d
> 2
> 	Item B
> 	Mar 21
> 	Mar 21
> 	1d
>
>
> 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:
>
> WBS
> 	Name
> 	Start
> 	Finish
> 	Work
> 1
> 	Item A
> 	Mar 21
> 	Mar 21
> 	1d
> 2
> 	Item B
> 	Mar 22
> 	Mar 22
> 	1d
>
>
> 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:
>
> WBS
> 	Name
> 	Start
> 	Finish
> 	Work
> 1
> 	Item A
> 	Mar 21
> 	Mar 22
> 	1d
> 2
> 	Item B
> 	Mar 21
> 	Mar 22
> 	1d
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>

--
 /------------------------------------+-------------------------\
|Stephen J. Gowdy                     | SLAC, MailStop 34,       |
|http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~gowdy/ | 2575 Sand Hill Road,     |
|http://calendar.yahoo.com/gowdy      | Menlo Park CA 94025, USA |
|EMail: gowdy slac stanford edu       | Tel: +1 650 926 3144     |
 \------------------------------------+-------------------------/

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