Adding temporary increases in project member work hours
We have a question about whether it is possible to temporarily increase the working hours of project members to prevent the project end date from changing.
In RTC the basic premise with scheduling appears to be that you record normal working hours of staff and annual leave and then let the actual progress determine when the project will finish. However, we are a little reluctant to have the finish date move forward and are hoping to recover ground by working on a number of weekends.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this. You can permanently change your working hours, but not for a limited time. And it is difficult to change your normal working hours to e.g. include Saturdays and then record most of the Saturdays as holidays, as a workaround. We thought of the Time-Tracking tab in work items, which records actual hours worked on the weekend, but those are different to planned hours.
Would this be a valid RFE?
I ask because I believe this may go against fundamental RTC scheduling concepts. That is.. if your project is behind schedule, you should let the finish date change accordingly to reflect when you might reasonably be expected to finish the project, rather than trying to squeeze extra time out of weekends to make up lost ground etc.. Is this a fundamental concept? (We are using a formal template). Or might this be considered?
Our thinking is sometimes described as plan-based project management and we are not sure, but I think there was some discussion about this in the past. Rational Project Conductor I believe had the ability to have a plan-based schedule, but that was not included in RTC.
See this link for background:
https://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2011/01/18/where-is-rational-project-conductor/
In RTC the basic premise with scheduling appears to be that you record normal working hours of staff and annual leave and then let the actual progress determine when the project will finish. However, we are a little reluctant to have the finish date move forward and are hoping to recover ground by working on a number of weekends.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this. You can permanently change your working hours, but not for a limited time. And it is difficult to change your normal working hours to e.g. include Saturdays and then record most of the Saturdays as holidays, as a workaround. We thought of the Time-Tracking tab in work items, which records actual hours worked on the weekend, but those are different to planned hours.
Would this be a valid RFE?
I ask because I believe this may go against fundamental RTC scheduling concepts. That is.. if your project is behind schedule, you should let the finish date change accordingly to reflect when you might reasonably be expected to finish the project, rather than trying to squeeze extra time out of weekends to make up lost ground etc.. Is this a fundamental concept? (We are using a formal template). Or might this be considered?
Our thinking is sometimes described as plan-based project management and we are not sure, but I think there was some discussion about this in the past. Rational Project Conductor I believe had the ability to have a plan-based schedule, but that was not included in RTC.
See this link for background:
https://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2011/01/18/where-is-rational-project-conductor/
Accepted answer
As far as I am aware, there is no mechanism to throttle up working hours as your plan desires. Quite the opposite.
The idea in RTC is to show you that the plan ain't gonna work with the current velocity. You can change the plan e.g. plan stories in another sprint and keep a sustainable pace. The idea is not to make the plan work, albeit it is unrealistic, just by putting in over time.
You can make people work more hours and they might catch up, without changing the data.
You can increase the user allocation or change the work hours at each developer. You can add users to the teams, but there is no way to create a profile for over time.
You can certainly create a RFE, it will be up to product management to decide to do this.
The idea in RTC is to show you that the plan ain't gonna work with the current velocity. You can change the plan e.g. plan stories in another sprint and keep a sustainable pace. The idea is not to make the plan work, albeit it is unrealistic, just by putting in over time.
You can make people work more hours and they might catch up, without changing the data.
You can increase the user allocation or change the work hours at each developer. You can add users to the teams, but there is no way to create a profile for over time.
You can certainly create a RFE, it will be up to product management to decide to do this.