Prerequisites for project planning#

Project planning can become very complex. Therefore, it is important to understand the model underlying a planning process.

Planable and non-planable items#

The system distinguishes between planable and non-planable items. Only planable items are displayed in the Gantt chart. Planable items are of the item type “Task” or other item types with the type flag “Task”. If you want to be able to fix milestones in terms of time, it is recommended to create an item type “Milestone” with the type flag “Task”.

Non-planable items are taken into account in resource utilization, but are never displayed in the Gantt chart. This includes, for example, tickets that come in from outside, or action items that result from meetings.

Plan and baseline plan#

The system supports to some extent two plans:

  • The actual plan (“Plan”)

  • A baseline plan, also to be understood as a plan specification or desired plan

The plans differ exclusively by the attributes described in the following table. So both plans contain the same items with the same links, the same assigned resources and responsible persons and also all other attributes not listed in the table. To be able to work with baseline plans, the check box “Top-down” under Perspective Administration > Server Administration > Server Configuration > Other must be marked.

Plan Attribute

Baseline Attribute

Description

Start

Desired Start

Start of an item

End

Desired End

End date of an item

Duration

Desired Duration

Duration of an item, i.e. end - start minus non-working time

Planned

Budget

Effort in working hours or working days and other expenses e.g. for external services

Duration#

The duration of an item is determined by the start time minus the end time minus the non-working time defined by the calendar of the responsible person assigned to this item. If a group is stored as the responsible person, the available capacity is calculated from the sum of the capacity of the group members. Responsible persons who already belong to a group must not be assigned again directly or via other groups.

If the duration is zero, the item is interpreted and displayed as a milestone. The following graphic shows three items, marked by the colors red, blue and green. The red item starts on Wednesday at 8 a.m. and has a duration of 16 hours. It therefore ends the following day at 5 p.m. The blue item starts on Wednesday at 1 p.m., has a duration of 8 hours and ends the following day at 12 p.m. The green item has a duration of 16 hours and extends over a non-working weekend. Everything is based in this case on a responsible person’s calendar with 8 hours of work per day and working hours from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. interrupted by a one-hour break.

../../_images/duration1.png

Planned#

“Planned” refers to the time efforts and material costs of the plan. The conversion from working days to working hours is based on the assigned workspace calendar.

The values for “planned” of collective items result from the summed up values of the subordinate items.

Budget#

The “budget” describes the estimated time efforts and material costs of the baseline plan or the plan specification. The “planned” values must be within the budget. For projects for external customers, the budget can also be considered the contract sum.

Budgets are not summed up, but provide a framework. It is common to carry out budget planning only for the hierarchically higher levels and not as detailed as the actual planning with “planned”.

The conversion from working days to working hours is based on the assigned workspace calendar.

Remaining#

“Remaining” refers to the estimated remaining effort until completion of an item. Ideally, this remaining effort has the value for “planned” minus the already performed effort (“current”).

The conversion from working days to working hours is based on the assigned workspace calendar.

Hierarchical behavior#

You can configure the hierarchical behavior of the date attributes (see:ref:fieldTypes). The recommended default setting is “Adjust parent”. This calculates the values for start and end from their subordinate items. In this case, the following rules apply recursively:

  • The start is the earliest start date of all directly subordinate items.

  • The end is the latest end date of all directly subordinate items.

  • The planned value is the sum of the planned values of all directly subordinate items.

If you are working with baseline plans or plan specifications, the following additional rules apply recursively:

  • The desired start for each directly subordinate position must be on or after the desired start of the parent item.

  • The desired end for all directly subordinate items must be before the desired end of the parent item.

  • The budget of a parent item must be greater or equal to the sum of all budgets for all directly subordinate items.

The system alerts you to conflicts between the baseline plan values and the plan values, but they are not prevented. Only if you have permissions to read both the baseline plan and the plan values, you receive information about such conflicts.

Date values without time#

You can configure date values to appear on the input masks with or without time specifications (see:ref:fieldTypes). If you display the date values without a time specification, the start of work time of the responsible person is assumed for the start of work of an item and for the end the end of work time of the responsible person, e.g. from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for an employee with an eight-hour work day with a one-hour break and a start of work at 8 a.m.

Fix dates of individual items#

You can configure item types so that their items can be explicitly fixed in terms of time. For this, you need to place the item attribute FixedDate for fixing the date values of the plan and for the date values of the baseline plan the item attribute FixedTDDate on the input mask and activate the corresponding check boxes.

Fix dates for milestones and via filters#

You can fix items based on a filter. To do this, create a public filter with the corresponding conditions (e.g. (Start more than X days 0 OR Status is Done)), save it e.g. under the name GanttFixFilter and enter the name of the filter in the property `` gantt.fixFilter=GanttFixFilter `` in the extended configuration file GeneralSettings.properties (see Configuration Files). This example would fix all items in terms of time that are already completed or whose start is in the past.

Lift individual date fixations#

You can temporarily lift the fixation of individual dates via the context menu in the Gantt chart so that they can be moved.