How to plan a team member's tasks?
Sorry for this whole bunch of questions regarding the planning of a team member's tasks.
The scenario is the same for all:
A team member has been assigned several tasks and she now wants to organize them in time. She can do that in either the My Work view (Eclipse) or Planned Time view (Web). She can drag the tasks from the inbox to the sections like 'today', 'later this week', etc. That way, she can influence the order of the planned execution of the tasks.
My questions:
1. Obviously RTC calculates a due date internally. Is there a documentation of the algorithm how this is done? Is the order the only parameter of the calculation or are there others considered, e.g. 'blocks' dependencies or others?
2. The 'order' as well as the calculated due date seem to be internal attributes of a work item (?). Can they be visualized in any way, e.g. in the WI editor, a report/dashboard or sth. similar? A team member might have to report when a task is planned to be completed.
3. How to deal with tasks, which are probably not executed continuously and its not known up front, when portions of the task will be worked out? Example: the task is to work out a concept for sth. To do that you have to discuss with three people. You don't know yet when they will be available and you probably won't get them all at the same time. You only know, that it will take 3 hours of effort within the next 2 weeks, but it might happen that you spent 3 times one hour with each person whenever it becomes available. How could you express that in your plan?
4. How to deal with tasks that have a fixed due date?
Currently I see an option to specify a date in the 'due date' attribute and then get a warning when the calculated due date is later than the provided due date. Now you manually have to reorder the tasks to recover from that problem. Is there a way to let RTC solve that conflict automatically?
Sorry for this lengthy post %-)
Andreas
The scenario is the same for all:
A team member has been assigned several tasks and she now wants to organize them in time. She can do that in either the My Work view (Eclipse) or Planned Time view (Web). She can drag the tasks from the inbox to the sections like 'today', 'later this week', etc. That way, she can influence the order of the planned execution of the tasks.
My questions:
1. Obviously RTC calculates a due date internally. Is there a documentation of the algorithm how this is done? Is the order the only parameter of the calculation or are there others considered, e.g. 'blocks' dependencies or others?
2. The 'order' as well as the calculated due date seem to be internal attributes of a work item (?). Can they be visualized in any way, e.g. in the WI editor, a report/dashboard or sth. similar? A team member might have to report when a task is planned to be completed.
3. How to deal with tasks, which are probably not executed continuously and its not known up front, when portions of the task will be worked out? Example: the task is to work out a concept for sth. To do that you have to discuss with three people. You don't know yet when they will be available and you probably won't get them all at the same time. You only know, that it will take 3 hours of effort within the next 2 weeks, but it might happen that you spent 3 times one hour with each person whenever it becomes available. How could you express that in your plan?
4. How to deal with tasks that have a fixed due date?
Currently I see an option to specify a date in the 'due date' attribute and then get a warning when the calculated due date is later than the provided due date. Now you manually have to reorder the tasks to recover from that problem. Is there a way to let RTC solve that conflict automatically?
Sorry for this lengthy post %-)
Andreas