[Wylug-discuss] Project Management software

[Chris Davies]

I wittered:
 > [Planner / MrProject is] where I started. Unfortunately it has no resource
 > smoothing at all.


Jim Jackson wrote:
> Ok I'll bite, it sounds like management bollocks, but no doubt it does 
> mean something serious, but what? Just curious.

Consider a small project, where you have three Development "bits" (B, C, D) each 
of which is dependent on the Specification (A). All three development bits are 
to be done by the same programmer.

Looking purely at the task dependencies you would get a Gantt Chart that looks a 
bit like this (fixed fonts):

A	XXXXXXXX
B	        XXXX
C	        XXX
D	        XXXXXX

Unfortunately this means that the single programmer is now supposed to do all 
three pieces of work simultaneously - you have a 300% resource allocation.

Resource Smoothing is the term given to the process that adjusts the start dates 
of each piece of work so that no resource (i.e. our programmer) is over 
allocated. The resulting Gantt Chart might look like this:

A	XXXXXXXX
B	        XXXX
C	            XXX
D	               XXXXXX


Imendio Planner aka Mr Project doesn't do this, and when you have a large number 
of tasks and a large number of programmers it gets *very* painful to have to do 
it manually.

Regards,
Chris
-- 
Chris Davies MBCS, chris.davies at bcs.org.uk, 07778 199069