Duration

Discussion

Adding resources to fixed duration tasks

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Hello,

I am struggling a bit with adding resources to a fixed duration task. Any help is appreciated.

Summary

If you have a fixed duration task, ProjectLibre does not appear to properly handle resource adjustment by work, only by units. 

...Unless I am missing something! Is this a bug?

Example

My goal is to add resources at less than 100% (units) to a fixed duration task. This is a pretty common situation in my projects. I am assuming here that:

Work = Duration X Units

And that the behaviour should work something like the attached image (courtesy of http://epmstrategy.com/WhitePapers/EPM%20Strategy%20Task%20Types.pdf

So a hypothetical case: 5 day fixed dur, Resource A @ 50% units (i.e. 20 hrs work)

  • Step 1: add task of 5 day duration
  • Step 2: make task fixed duration and turn off effort driven
  • Step 3: assign Resource A (defaults to 100% units, 40 hrs work)
  • Step 4: adjust Resource A by:
    • Option 1: Change units to 50% --> This works as expected = total duration 5 days, work is 20 hrs
    • Option 2: Change work to 20 hours --> This does not work = 40 hours work (what!?) 200% units, total duration 2.5 days); the maths works, but the task duration was most definitely not fixed.
  • Step 5: Adding a second resource at lower work follows the same pattern above, except that in Option 2 (adjusting work), the units are correctly adjusted and the task duration is fixed. Presumably, this is because the task is driven by Resource A.

Interestingly, If I pause at Step 4 Option 2, and try to fix it back by over-writing the work again to 20 hours: work changes back to 40 hours, units are 400% and duration is 1.25 days. This keeps going, theoretically infinitely.

While the above suggests I can work around the issue by only adjusting units, this is a bit of a pain as I will need to figure out, each time, what % equates to a specific amount of work. This is even more of a pain with irrational numbers or repeating fractions. It could lead to small errors in estimates (potentially significant in the aggregate).

Matthew

Discussion

gantt chart view

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I am working on a project using duration settings in hours.  When you zoom in to show the hours, it starts at 0:00 ... is there a way to change the display to a different start time ... say, 8:00? 

Please refer to screenshot below for further clarification if needed.

Additionally, how do you have the gantt chart start @ project start date.  For some reason, mine is starting on Sunday, March 20.

Discussion

Struggling to apply multiple resources with different work commitment to one task

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Dear All,

I am tryint to set up a task, which requires a total of 40 hours of week, which may spread over 10 days duration. I am using the "Fixed Work" type. All works well, until I start adding resources. Initially, can add all resources, but when I want to change their individual hours, the duration changes to the total hours accoding to the resources calendar. When I want to change this again to reflect that the actual work may be spread over two weeks, all goes haywire and I cannot spread the total work hours over the resouces as I deem fit. To make things worse, PL also insists during this process to change the default contrain type to "Start no earlier than", which I suspect is a bug.

Is this normal behaviour and I am using the software wrongly? If so, how would I do this best, e. g., setting up 3 different sub-tasks for each resource? Or shall I leave the "Duration" alone and add some "Lag" to any successor to reflect that this task can move flexibly within a certain time frame?

Thanks for your help

Tom

Discussion

Change Duartion to Hours instead of Days

1 comment(s)

Hi All,

I'm a new ProjectLibre user and I'm sure this is a silly question, but how can I change the application to display duration as hours instead of days? 

Discussion

changing working hour but keeping the duration

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Hey I have this project which I have to hand in by tomorrow, I think my problem is quiet simple one but I'm really new to project management and this softwarre and can not figure it out.

 

I need to keep the duration of the task but change the hourse that resource works, for example, the task takes 8 days but the person needs to work 4 hours per day. Everytime I change the houre the task duration changes as well. can some one please help with this?

Discussion

Task fixed duration but variable resource.

0 comment(s)

HI,

 

there is one thing that is driving me nuts with PL. It may be because of my poor understanding of how similar softwares work. I have never used MS project or similar before. BTW, it is really great that you have taken on board this task of creating a real alternative to MS Project as the open source world really needs a product like this. Many colleagues use it so I understand that there is a place for it.

I have a project (consultancy services) where I have set a main task (create a large report) with several subtasks (stages of the report and review stages, etc). Three people are involved with this report. The subtasks are set over periods of weeks (eg. subtask 1=2 weeks; subtask 2=3weeks and is dependant of finalising subtask1, etc.). The three people resourced, in total have allocated hours that summed up, do not equal 2x40hrs or 3x40hrs. So what happens is that as soon as I assign 10hrs for person 1, 10 hrs for person 2 and 5hrs for person three (25hrs total), PL adjusts the duration to fit around this sum. How can I stop PL from doing this? The resources (3 people) have to be deployed over many projects over those three weeks and they cannot use their allocated time in one chunck to the specific subtask.

In the "Advance" tab, I selected "Fixed Duration" as Type adn deselected the "Effort Drivern" button. Is this right?

I hope I have made my problem clear enough.

 

BTW, as a wish list item, it would be good to be able to select colours of items on gantt chart. The yellow dots for the deadlines are hardly visible when you print them.

CHeers
Antonio

Discussion

Work and Duration

1 comment(s)

Hello,

I added the column "work" next to "duration". First is shown in hours, second in days. Is it possible to set both same? I prefer to work with days only. It is not very useful to work with thousend of hours if you want to set 100 or 200 days for a single task.

Thank you