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

[Jani Tiainen <redetin luukku com>]

Gary Moffatt kirjoitti:
> 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. 

Interesting point of a view. But not totally true - except periodicity 
because that's what projects are.

I work usually in two different types of project (in point of periods), 
common to both is deadline. Another porject is billed periodically by 
hours worked, another is fixed cost.

But in neither case billing is not vital for a project - customer is 
happy to see project finished on date. Preferably a bit beforehand... =)

For company billing is vital - you have to pay salaries for people and 
it's nice to make profit.

> 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.

How this relates to Planner? Except with right tool (one that can read 
XML) generate reports as you wish, feed data anywhere you wish etc. 
because format of XML in Planner is open.

In this particular problem would be reading articles from Dr. Goldratt, 
even things you described are usually found in ERP or similiar tools, 
not on simple project planning tool... =)

--

Jani Tiainen