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

[Gary Moffatt <gemoffatt ont com>]

Once upon a time, several years ago I wrote a very long message explaining how 
leveling works in P3. More important than inflicting the problematic use of a 
computer to make decisions on the world you _must_ think about periodicity. 
Work periods are important but billing periods are vital. My (expensive) 
software keeps track of resources and cost - I can bill progress payments 
right out of my program or feed my data into accounting software. More 
important than that my schedules are defensable in court - don't try that 
with uncle Bill. My schedules get a new file structure every month and I can 
target previous months for comparison. With report writing software I can do 
aging and historical analysis of progress because the months are all in the 
database. Dr Goldrat uses afik some kind of expert system to decide if a 
comes before b which I guess must have a huge database (maybe like the whole 
of Means) underneath. P3 allows me to create rules that prioritize resource 
decisions but ultimately I want to make the decisions myself - I run the auto 
leveling to see what it does and them make the ties manually. I have over 300 
contractors on my present project many of whom have major subschedules of 
their own. (I am not the only scheduler here either, thankfully). If you are 
not the only one looking at the schedule you will hear about every mistake 
quickly. Please keep in mind at all times that the purpose of scheduling 
software is to calculate dates from logic and resources. I hope Planner will 
support the whole XML standard date structure eventually if it doesn't 
already. Keep up the good work and thanks.

On Monday 21 March 2005 05:13 pm, Richard Hult wrote:
> Struan Bartlett wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> Hello,
>
> > 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?
>
> You haven't missed anything :) We have been talking about adding this
> feature for a while but so far nobody has had the time to do it or
> figure out exactly how it should be done.
>
> /Richard

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Registered Linux user #312657