Prerequisites for project planning

Prerequisites for project planning#

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Project planning can become very complex. It is therefore important to understand the model underlying a planning process.

Schedulable and non-schedulable items#

The system distinguishes between schedulable and non-schedulable items. Only schedulable items are displayed in the Gantt chart. Schedulable 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 time, it is advisable to create an item type “Milestone” with the type flag “Task”.

Non-schedulable items are taken into account in resource utilization, but are never displayed in the Gantt chart. These are, for example, tickets coming in from outside, or action points resulting from meetings.

Plan and baseline#

To a certain extent, the system supports two plans:

  • The actual plan (“Plan”)

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

The plans differ exclusively by the attributes described in the following table. In both plans, the same items therefore exist with the same links, the same assigned resources and responsibles, and also all other attributes not listed in the table. To be able to work with baselines, the “Top-down” check box under Administration perspective > Server administration > Server configuration > Other must be selected.

Plan attribute

Baseline attribute

Description

Start

Target start

Start of an item

End

Target end

End date of an item

Duration

Target 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, less the non-working time defined by the calendar of the responsible assigned to this item. If a group is stored as the responsible, the available capacity is calculated from the sum of the capacities of the group members. Responsibles who already belong to a group must not be assigned again directly or via other groups.

If the duration equals zero, the item is interpreted and displayed as a milestone. The following graphic shows three items, identified 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 on the following day at 5:00 p.m. The blue item starts on Wednesday at 1:00 p.m., has a duration of 8 hours, and ends on the following day at 12:00 p.m. The green item has a duration of 16 hours and extends over a non-working weekend. In this case, everything is based on a responsible’s calendar with 8 hours of work per day and working hours from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 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 “planned” values of summary 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 or the plan target. The “planned” values must lie within the budget. For projects for external customers, the budget can also be regarded as the order total.

Budgets are not summed up but instead define a framework. It is customary to perform budget planning only for the higher hierarchical levels and not in as much detail 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 an item is completed. In the ideal case, this remaining effort has the value of “planned” minus the effort already spent (“actual”).

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 Item attribute types). The recommended default setting is “Adjust parent”. With this, the values for start and end are calculated 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 work with baselines or plan targets, the following additional rules apply recursively:

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

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

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

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

Date values without time#

You can configure date values so that they appear on the input forms with or without time information (see Item attribute types). If you have displayed the date values without time information, the start of working time of an item is assumed to be the start of working time of the responsible, and the end is the end of working time of the responsible, for example from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. for an employee with an eight-hour working day with a one-hour break and a start of working time of 8:00 a.m.

Fixing the dates of individual items#

You can configure item types so that the dates of their items can be explicitly fixed. To do this, for fixing the date values of the plan you must place the item attribute FixedDate, and for the date values of the baseline the item attribute FixedTDDate, on the input form and activate the corresponding check boxes.

Fixing dates for milestones and via filters#

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

Releasing individual date fixings#

You can temporarily release the fixing of individual dates via the context menu in the Gantt chart, so that they can be moved.

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