[Planner Dev] Planner - Suggestion for Deliverable or Objective view.

["lincoln phipps openmutual net" <lincoln phipps openmutual net>]

The problem with Planner from a project manager point of view
(which is also a criticism aimed at MS Project) is that it starts
with the gantt view and is focused on tasks and resources.

What it doesn't do is allow you to easily see what your Project
objectives or deliverables are and how close you are to your
objectives or how complete are the deliverables. Truthfully you
don't do projects unless you have objectives or deliverables.

We usually imply these with Milestones e.g. one can be defined and
given a title of "Completed Product" and "Completed Install Manual"
but what needed is a nice and easy View of these objectives and
I don't just mean a view of milestones !

What I'm envisaging is that this "Objective View" would also be
the default view for Planner and that project managers input the
project objectives /deliverables and then focus on tasks and resources
for each of these deliverables in turn. You would set an
association (I'll call it a binding) from 1 or a set of tasks
(and thus implicitly the assigned resources) to each deliverable.
This would thus allow you to quickly show how many of the project
deliverables are actually completed as opposed to how much of
the tasks are completed; a subtle but important difference when
it comes to actually getting payment from a client for whats
delivered (Imagine the message "I'm not paying you to complete
tasks but paying you to deliver my manual/program/widget").

A deliverable is not complete until all the tasks it's bound
to are complete. We would have to work on a heuristic for completion
but the most obvious is simply the

	sum of all the bound tasks (work * completion).

I'm thinking a table view,

|Deliverable | %Compl | Due Date | Work To Go | Bound To    | Resources  |
+------------+--------+----------+------------+-------------+------------+
| Widget 1   |  15%   | 1 October|   15 Days  | 1.6.5, 2.5  | RH, LP, ACS|

With hotspots on the WBS and the Shortname that go to those
Tasks/Resources.

Any views on this from the Project Managers ?. I've raised a
bugzilla,

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146695

and will add stuff as it evolves but I  think it addresses this
problem thats been bugging me on how to make Planner project-centric
as opposed to task-centric.

Rgds,
Lincoln.