Any chance of ever getting a contour pattern that "fills in the gaps"?

[Steve Schacher]

I'm looking for an enhancement to leveling that behaves like Project
Workbench's contour pattern that will fill in remaining gaps with time
from a task.

I want to be able to assign resources to baseline tasks with fixed
percents of time, and also be able to assign them to additional fixed
work tasks at whatever availability is left and then let the leveler
find the time to schedule the task by reducing the daily work to
whatever is needed to reach the resource's max availability. I'm
guessing that the best way to do this is by enhancing the usage of
contour patterns on an assignment by assignment basis. Currently, I
have to look at a resource's histogram to see what their percent
allocation is during the periods in question and then enter the
remaining percent as the units for the assignment. I'd like to see MSP
enhanced to do this for me if I set a designated contour pattern.

Any chance of MSP satisfying this need (want?) in a future release?

Steve Schacher
ChevronTexaco

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hello Steve,

I'm not sure what exactly you are looking for, but filling in the gaps is
something leveling can do now.
When you add a low priority task to a plan, and level week by week or month
by month, it will position itself to fill in the gaps, even if you use all
sorts of Units%.

Better still, if you start from the principle that whoever works does that
100% of his brain, thus all tasks will have 100% assignment units, leveling
(also day by day, hour buy hour...) perfectly positions the new tasks in the
existing TIME GAPS.

But since there have not been any sizable developments to the scheduling
engine since 98, I wouldn't count on many new features in the area of
leveling.
THIS IS A PERSONAL GUESS - I know nobody in the MS labs!

HTH
--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
Project Management Consultancy
Prom+ade BVBA
32-495-300 620

 

[Steve Schacher]

Jan,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I haven't tried leveling at more than a day yet. What I'm trying to do
is put a process in place to manage the governance of enhancement
requests in a production support environment. We recently went live on
a large project and have a support staff split between supporting a
help desk, making bug fixes, and developing system enhancements. Our
staff hasn't evolved yet to the point where we will dedicate resources
to either support or enhancements, so we're currently assigning work
as it arrives. We are also bundling the enhancements into monthly
releases and trying to plan for which enhancements will go into which
releases based on the availability of the resources (skill sets) to do
the work. This also bottlenecks some work as we tend to rely on the
same resources over and over until the skill level matures.

To manage this, I set up several team-level Project files for the team
leads to plan out their baseline work (end-user support, bug fixes,
general consultation, etc). I also have all the resources in a
resource pool that is linked to all the team-level files. In the
team-level project files, the leads are assigning the resources to
fixed unit tasks, so that person X is assigned 15% of his time to
end-user support, 20% to bug fixes, etc. Whatever is left after fixed
unit baseline support is available for enhancement work.

For the enhancements, I am using a master project/subproject setup
where the master file pulls in the team-level files as linked tasks,
and the resource pool. Each team-level baseline task has a priority of
1000 so they will not level. Each enhancement request is a task in the
master project that I load from a database that manages the governance
of enhancements with a priority. These tasks are fixed work tasks
where the work is assigned to "generic" resources that represent the
needed skillsets for the enhancement. During release planning, we want
to replace the generic resources with actual people based on their
availability.

I'd like to be able to use automatic leveling during a meeting with
team leads and business unit representatives where we can assign a
resource and let Project tell us when to schedule the release.
Currently, the generic resource is loaded with Units at 100%.
Naturally, when I replace the generic resources with real people, the
task shifts out to beyond the baseline plan. I then have to look up
the person's histogram (or have a percent allocation report in front
of me) to see what the utilization is and change the Units=100% to the
person's remaining availability in order to "slot" the work. I'd like
Project to be able to assign the work for me for the enhancement tasks
so that they schedule in parallel with the baseline work by using the
remaining availability without overallocating the resource.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Steve Schacher

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Steve

I just last week programmed a VBA thing to answer about the same question
for the Web Publishing division of one of my clients.
Basicly I would define all the enhancement tasks with an assignment
percentage which is teh max units you have for the resource (say a 1 day
full time task rather than a 4 days task @ 25%)
Then do leveling after each task introduction.

But I haven't any client feedbeck so far because of his holidays.

HTH
--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
Project Management Consultancy
Prom+ade BVBA
32-495-300 620

 

[Steve Schacher]

Do you have any VB or VBA experience?

No, I was a programmer during the mainframe days. Then I did
relational database modeling. No VB or VBA, just SQL, and then
facilitating modeling sessions with programmers and users.

I have been dabbling with Access lately, but mostly using the wizards
to create the code and then tweaking it when necessary. Nothing from
scratch.

Are there some good primers where I can learn the basics, and then
what Project uses/needs?

Steve