General tasks

[fonkse]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to add a general task, which can be done at any free time, even in multiple steps.

an example:
you have teammember, scheduled and planned for about 80 % of the time for development tasks. On the other hand, you have a pile of documents that needs to be sorted.
You want to schedule a task for the programmer to file the documents, whenever there is no other task planned for that person. (planning 80% on development, and 20% on the sorting task is not the sollution I am looking for...)

Is there a way to spread that one task in MS Porject 2000, whenever there is no other work planned for that person?

thanks
B

 

[BNPMike]

I've worked with MS Project planners on several occasions and they tend to shun automatic features. I now follow this style and find it is less stressful.

Build your plan based on the 80% tasks, review resource utilisation levels and then add in your background tasks manually to bring utilisation up to 100%.

You don't get Word to write your documents for you so why so you need to get MS Project to lay out your plans.

However:

planning 80% on development, and 20% on the sorting task is not the sollution I am looking for...)

seems like a rather willfull position to take.


My view is if your week ever shows the slightest resemblance to any plan you made, then you urgently need to seek personality counselling.

 

[fonkse]

Instead of planning 8.5 hours or 100% a day per person, I plan 7 hours a day, which leaves about 20% for unscheduled tasks.
Maybe not the best way to plan your work, but it seems to have worked so far...

I planned my tasks, but, as in any development project, your developers depend on your analists. As my team is limited during the summer, every now and then, there will be a period where I don't have analysis ready for the developers on time. I would like to give them a testing task for less urgent applications. As the project goes, some tasks might take longer than planned, and therefore, I cannot link these tasks to specific dates or times.
If there was a way in MS Project that would allow to spread a task whenever a person has time available, the task would shift in the planning, depending on the differences between the planned work and the actual work.
The 80%-20% solution may be the easy way out, but it does not allow me to have an indication when this task will be finished... I do use it for other general tasks, without a fixed duration or strict deadline (general maintenance, project management...).

If I am wrong, please tell me, it is the only way I can learn...

 

[BNPMike]

Let me preface this fonske by saying that what follows is entirely personal opinion and many other people would totally disagree.

My observations are

1) A plan is something that tests whether you can achieve what you want in the time you have to achieve it. Actually following a plan is a) extraodinarily hard work and b) achieves absolutely nothing. Manage day-by-day according to what seems good at the time. Re-do your plan only when you need to. You may need to because you've wondered too far away from what you originally decided or more often because some other person forces you to do a plan eg they're an IT Department Manager or QA Manager.

Of course millions of projects have people filling in detailed plans coupled with intricate earned-value calculations. These projects cost millions and 90% of the time are late.

When you write a detailed plan of what you're going to do at the weekend with your familiy, and follow it, then I'll consider changing my mind on the subject.

Sure I've done totally detailed plans and of course what happens is, well what happens is something completely different (because none of us is clairvoyant). So you spend another n hours correcting the plan and comparing it against the baseline. What a totally vacuous way to live!

2) A developer should surely be someone who doesn't need an analyst. I thought we got away from this model 20 years ago. Either sack all the people you've got or turn them into true analyst/programmers.

 

[fonkse]

You are right, detailled planning of a project, is somehow a waste of time, on the other hand, it is a good way to make estimations, and forces you to consider,in advance, what it will take to get the job done.
I make detailled plans because it is the requirement of the company to do so... Is it possible to follow the plan 100%? no, I don't think so. It does help in making the deadline. Do you need more resources? Do you need to reset your goals? Are there other resources needed?
Making the link to other projects is also quite handy. For my manager that is...
Keeping track of how long a task actually took, in MS Project, shows you the impact of that delay, and let's you make the necesairy changes.

I wasn't around 20 years ago, but I cannot ask a junior to make an analysis that will take him/her a week, while someone else can do the job better in 1 day. I got my profiles, and yes, i give them time and space to learn and get the experience they need, but I am not going to do that on critical moments and projects.
You cannot ask someone who just left college/university, who doesn't know the systems and the software to start analysing, can you?
As that person gets more and more experience, the analysis gets shorter, less detailed and your programmer becomes a prog/analist...

anyway, weekend, and still no solution for my problem ;-)