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

[Kurt Maute <Kurt Maute us>]

Hi Lincoln, 

You've got some excellent ideas.  I'll throw in my 2 cents...

On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 05:07, lincoln phipps openmutual net wrote:
> 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.

Wouldn't your project hierarchy take care of the associations?  In other
words, your WBS defines your project deliverables and the tasks
supporting those deliverables should be nested beneath them:

Site Move (Project)
1 New Data Center (Deliverable)
1.1  WAN Connectivity (Deliverable)
1.1.1    Task A
1.1.2    Task B
1.1.3    Task C
1.2  UPS (Deliverable)
1.2.1    Task D
1.2.2    Task E
etc...

The trick, it seems to me, is to let Planner know which are the
deliverables, and which are the tasks so that it can do an effective job
of rolling up for the Objective View.

> 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|

Your 'Bound To' column wouldn't be needed if you buy what I said above,
but perhaps would be good to show predecessors here instead?

A variation on the Gantt would be helpful as well to graphically show
progress against the plan ("Progress Gantt"?).  In my experience, its
often easier to communicate with pictures and graphs - at least when
making presentations that is.

Perhaps the view could be collapsed by default, but allow drilldown to
the task level to see what may be falling behind schedule?

Finally, I've always struggled with a good way to get MSP to show me a
concise view of what tasks should be active in the current and next week
or so.  In other words, I've got to manually scan down my plan for tasks
that should have started already or are about to start, and tasks that
should have finished already or should be finished soon.  This is a
special pain with larger plans.  I'm not sure if this would need to be a
separate view, or a variation of the view you're proposing.

Thoughts?

-- 
Kurt Maute <Kurt Maute us>