On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 6:56 PM, Nicholas Tang <[email protected]> wrote: > Actually, I'm not sure that what you described works... not for the > way I'd like to do things, anyways. Rearranging project (or task) > ordering should be something I can do dynamically and immediately and > the dates should be based purely on resource (i.e. people) > limitations, and I don't *think* that what you described would work.
You're right; I've omitted some things. To deal with the availability of people and other resources, Project has calendars for the project, as well as for the individual resources. You can create a default project calendar that includes things like the normal working time (8-6, M-F, perhaps?) and company holidays. You can also create additional calendars that show things like shift work at different hours. Then you can assign calendars to resources. Resources also have individual calendars that can reflect vacation, training, or other gaps in availability. Now, when you assign a resource to a (detail) task, their calendar will affect the way Project calculates the timeline, so that the task will be scheduled to account for weekends, holidays, vacation and whatnot. Note this all happens without touching the task start and end date. I think the general rule is to mess with the task start and end dates as little as possible. If you've built the initial model as I described yesterday, and handled resource assignment and scheduling as I described above, I think it gets a lot closer to what you need. Once the model is build, you can definitely reorder tasks and shift dependencies -- note that the dependencies should reflect the "pure" task dependencies (e.g., "this task needs the output of that one"), rather than resource issues (e.g., "this task needs to run on a new cluster that won't be available until March") And after all that, it's still possible that MS Project won't fit your needs, but I guess my real point is that, if you have MS Project (or something comparable) available, don't be too quick to run away from it. > I think this page I found does a decent job of explaining some of the > differences between how I'd like to schedule work > (resource-constraints) and how MS Project likes to schedule work > (time-constraints). > > http://www.openworkbench.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=42 I looked at that page, and it's interesting. It looks like OWB is trying to actually do resource assignment; MS Project has a way to do some resource assignment, but I've typically found it doesn't do what I need it to do. Instead, I usually build a MS Project model, and do my own resource assignment, using the model to do "what if" analysis on my proposed assignments until I find a set I like. It sounds like OWB will try to do the resource assignment on its own; if it does a good job, then it would be a better tool, for sure. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
