Re: Resource overutilization

Le Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 02:15:42PM -0700, Sasan Iman:
> 
> I don't think assigning to less than  100% would solve the problem. If I
> have to manually identify the overlapped time, then I can schedule it
> manually as well. The goal is to remove the necessity to manually
> identify the overlapped time (region of over-utilization)

For *that* part of your problem, the new view I'm working on is of
interest: it displays clearly the over-utilization (and, by the way,
the under-utilization) periods for each resource.

This is a resource/assignment oriented view, on the left part, a
tree, and on the right part, a chart (more or less like a Gantt):
- Resource 1
  - Task 1
  - Task 3
- Resource 2
  - Task 2
  - Task 5
In front of each "task" (really, an assignment, since a task can be
displayed several times if several resources are used) in the chart,
you see a bar that is like the one in the gantt chart.
In front of each resource, in the chart, you see a bar that goes from
the start of the project to the end, sawing with colors where are
over/under use:
- green for free time
- dark green for under-use
- blue for normal use
- red for over-use

It should be added in the CVS soon (this week?), and maybe one day in
the real MrProject.

To be totally usefull, this view need a few more information that are
not (yet?) in MrProject:
- the "normal" range of use: for now, I assume <100% is under-use, 100%
  in normal, and >100% is over-use; it would be of interest to add this
  information in the resource dialog, a resource can be a team in the
  real-world, so have a normal use of 500%, or be a part-time job,
  having a normal use of 60%. Part time job can be done with calendars,
  but not team.
- the tasks with no resource are not displayed, since they are hard to
  locate, so it can be interesting to create a "not assigned"
  resource.

> and also
> remove the need to rework the schedule because of changes in earlier
> parts. Even if I did manually assign less than 100%, then when schedule
> changes, I still need to go back and modify the percentages again. Not
> very convenient.

In fact, what you're describing is not that troublesome, or seems not to
be. Well, depends on your use of MrProject. For me, I expect two
different things from a project management tool:
- establish a first plan for the project, that is done during the first
  few days before the project starts, trying to guess who is going to do
  what, and when.
- have regular look to the project state: was the work done? in the
  timeline that was chosen? if not, how to adapt? What is going to be
  delayed? etc.

In the first part, automated decisions are of interest, but in the
second, I'm not that sure. When your project is started since two
months, you're not going to re-schedule the first tasks. So, for that
purpose, I guess it's a good start point to be able to see the possible
problems, and from that to decide what to do (which task to reschedule,
add or remove resources to tasks, and so on).

In fact, in the second part, a lot of informations might have been sent
to the people working on the project, so it sounds like a bad idea to
have the risk that MrProject is going to re-schedule everything only
because some detail changed.

There still lack some tools to be able to do this day by day work in
MrProject:
- a task cannot be broken in various pieces, which occurs often in the
  real world
- a task cannot have resources allocated in strange fashions: each
  resource allocated to the task during a given time interval.

Regards,

	Benjamin.