Fixing Planned Work for Fixed Duration Tasks

fladager — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:16:07 GMT

We have been running into this problem for three years and still don't have an answer.

Our organization uses Daptiv to track our ongoing work through Support-type projects. Each year, we set up another batch of these and allocate our staff and have them report effort against a small number of tasks. This part works great and the ability to look back over the actuals from last year when we create the next year's projects has been incredibly helpful.

Our troubles arise when we try to set up those tasks and keep them bound both to a fixed duration and to a fixed amount of planned work. An example:

My project is called PM Support and one of the tasks is PM Mentoring. I am the only one assigned to this task and I plan on spending 90 hours doing this activity over the next 12 months.

I enter the task through a Quick Add, specifying the Start and End dates and assign myself. The date automatically kicks out a couple of weeks because I have some personal non-working time defined.
I then go in and edit the task to change the end date back to our fiscal year and enter the planned work and then press Save. The date again kicks out but the planned work stays.
I go in a second time to adjust the end date and press Save. The date kicks out again.
After several rounds of this, I try messing with the Duration. A full year is 261 days so I try entering 255. This pulls the date back about 2 weeks but adjusts the planned work to be less than the 90 hours I was looking for. When I go back into the task to adjust the planned work, I find that the duration is now 247.30 days.
I edit the task again with an estimated duration of 259 days. I also change the planned work back to 90 and hit Save. Success!!

I'm glad I got it to work but this was 4 separate edits to a task just to get the initial dates and planned work to stick. With 5 similar tasks (2 that have multiple resources), I'm looking at going through this exercise 20 times to get just the initial tasks correctly set up. I've got 30 such projects to set up every year. No, we don't use MS Project so PT isn't an option.

To further compound the problem, I've got a manager who is trying to use Daptiv to record and track effort against negotiated SLAs, which are billed quarterly so he's got to go through this exercise 4 times a year.

What are we doing wrong? Note that our task type default is Fixed Duration and the projects are not effort driven.

Thanks!

Darlene

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Fixing Planned Work for Fixed Duration Tasks