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How to track a bunch of unrelated activities?

5 replies [Last post]
Sat, 2009-01-24 14:52
Evgeny Z.
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Hi everyone,

I need your advice on how to track the following activities.

There is a task for engineer to update / create a bunch of documents. There is no specific sequence in which they have to be done, also engineer may switch between documents.

But I have the following requirements:

• I need to be able to estimate the total amount of work (duration) needed for the whole activity.

• I need to be able to track completing of individual documents.


One thing I could have done is to put a schedule, where all documents need to be done one after another, but I do not want to force a specific sequence on engineer, it needs to be flexible. So, if would start working from the last document, I would have to change the schedule to update it.

Any ideas how it can be done?
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Replies

Fri, 2009-01-30 13:46
#1
Evgeny Z.
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Will,
thanks.

Unfortunately my current knowledge of MSP is apparently not sufficient to fully understand your answer.

<<
… assign units complete as the payment measurement type to a single task in MSP …..
>>
Can you just point me to where I can read more about it?

<<
method would show variences when statusing if there is work in progress on some of the documents
>>
What does exactly mean “statusing”?

Regards.
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Wed, 2009-01-28 19:15
#2
Will Green
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Hi all,

You could assign units complete as the payment measurement type to a single task in MSP. Each unit is one document and each unit is worth the average of the total time it will take to write all of the docs.(i.e. 12 docs taking various amounts of time but totaling 24 hours work would be 2 hours each) then adjust the duration according to how much of the Engineer’s time you would like to allocate to the activity. For each document that is completed you would claim one unit, however you would have to bear in mind that this method would show variences when statusing if there is work in progress on some of the documents.

Regards,
Will.
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Tue, 2009-01-27 13:17
#3
Evgeny Z.
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Darren, thanks.

This is what I have already been thinking about: to have an Excel spreadsheet, which calculates the % of completeness and in MS Project I just mark it.

Regards.
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Tue, 2009-01-27 12:22
#4
Darren Kosa
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Hi Giles,

This isn’t something that MS Project does very well. You may well have to time-box the activity with a single fixed duration task and track progress by the amount of individual documents the engineer completes, 1/20, 2/20, 3/20, etc.

However, to estimate the effort you definitely need to calculate the amount of work that goes into creating each document, then total it up and use that as the basis for the tasks duration. As long as you register that assumption in a log of some kind, then I don’t think you’ll have too much difficulty tracking the task.

The only problem is you can’t tell if there are any dependencies on individual documents with other tasks in the schedule.

Regards,

Darren
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Sun, 2009-01-25 00:26
#5
Trevor Rabey
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Giles, just make sure that you have a grip on planning and tracking a single Task, and then do the same thing on each of the other Tasks. If they are not related by predecessor conditions, don’t link them.
So you have 5 Tasks, each has a 10 Day Duration estimate.
Each has the engineer assigned.
You can’t assign the engineer at 100% or he will be over-allocated, so he has to be assigned at 20% for each Task, or some combination of assignment % that does not make the Total Work exceed the 80 Hours of Work that he has available in 10 Days.
After they are all done, there is an Actual Start and Actual Finish date for each Task, and an Actual Work for each day and each Task. Put these in the fields in the Tracking Table.

Nothing changes if the Durations are not all equal, 10 Days.
If you do a status check at day 5, say, nothing much changes except you have a Remaining Duration > 0 instead of an Actual Finish date.
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