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Old 07-22-2014, 12:35 PM
jgregs jgregs is offline Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Windows 8 Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Office 2010 32bit
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Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks
 
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Default Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks

Hi there



First post - this forum looks really useful.

Within a summary task, I have 8 tasks that need to be completed within a week. There are no dependencies between them, and two people will be working on them.

I've never planned how long each one takes as they are grouped in to a week's activity on other projects I've worked on. And I don't really care how they're divided between the two resources - I just need them doing in 5 days.

However, I do want to plan at that level of granularity to show the customer exactly what we're doing.

Do I just need to throw in some place holder dates to each task?
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Old 07-23-2014, 01:17 PM
JulieS JulieS is offline Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Windows 7 64bit Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Office 2013
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What is your work estimate for each package? If it's more than 10 hours of work per work package, you have a problem of lack of resources. You can certainly set up each of the 8 tasks as fixed duration (1 week) and assign a resource specify the work estimate. Project will spread the work out evenly over the 1 week duration. Assign 4 tasks to one resource and 4 to another.
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Old 07-25-2014, 02:25 AM
Guloluseus Guloluseus is offline Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Windows 7 64bit Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Office 2010 32bit
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Furthe to julies reply, I would tend to do it slightly differently. Firstly- although you say there are no dependancies, this does not inclkude resourcing. If you have a limit on resources (1 unit of both resources, being a person each) then this would affect the overall programme. I would tend to go with the split (4 tasks per person) and split these into 3 1-day and 1 2-day task. These can be linked to give a weeks duration (3*1 = 2) and resource A assigned to the first block, and resource B to the second.
For linking, I would link the second block as a start-to-start with the first, and then have both blocks lead to following activities. You can then either link block 1 from a predecessor or put in a start date, and everything else will follow logically.

I realise this does seem a bti more complicated and possibly overkill, but I like to ensure that everything is as clear as possible- clients get itchy in my trade (construction) if they cant see everything. It also means that should a task get missed, forgotten, or overrun, it is easy to amend the programme to reflect this and shw exactly where the additional time came from- useful for EoT, claims etc.
as I said, my line of work demands a very transparent programme with more detail that is really necessary to allow full analysis of changes, but the principle still stands
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Old 07-25-2014, 10:43 AM
JulieS JulieS is offline Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Windows 7 64bit Best practice when allocating a period of time to a number of tasks Office 2013
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Good points, Guloluseus. I agree that setting the dependencies is one way of solving the issue as well. The problem that I frequently see, however, is if there are truly no relationships between the tasks and you've imposed an order by linking F to S, resources frequently perform the tasks out of order. That can cause additional work to remove dependencies and set the correct Actual Start. I agree 100% with having the ability to show where overages come from - can still be done with my suggestion, as long as a baseline is saved.
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