[Planner Dev] Proposal to alter types of resources to own tables/elements (work=human or material and a human role and team)

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

Been thinking about how the current scheme in Planner
has a number of places that have humans created with their
attributes (email, phone etc) as manager roles and which
I feel should be brought into their own class.

Currently resource, group and project all have
humans defined with, ostensibly, hard-coded roles.

My suggestion is that we actually create separate
work (human) table/element with all the necessary attributes,
as well as a material (equipment) table/element, with
its (non-human) attributes.

We also create a "role" table which describes the "roles".
E.g. "Manager", "Student" or "Tutor" and to which the
human objects gets assigned as their role(s).

We also create a Team table which allows you to group
workers.


What are the advantages ?
==========================
This rationalises the Planner by allowing you to create
a completely arbitary role. The role may not even be typical
of a project e.g. Tutor, Student, Professor or Secretary or
it may be an inportant role in modern Project Management
practices e.g. QA or a project sponsor (who pays for all
of this).

What I envisage is that we can get people to create quite
arbitary roles (we'll pre-define a few e.g. Worker and
Manager to be backward compatible when we open older
Planner files) which can be extended quite arbitarily
i.e. you can name and describe the role in your own
specific terms or project management methodology.

Then a human gets allocate to one (or more) of these
roles. The tuple is the human name, role and that has
to be unique.

A project thus does not have a single Manager any more
but has a number of assigned humans who each have a
defined role. If one of those happens to be the role of
"Manager" then fine but you may not even want to call
them that but may call them e.g. "Project Leader" or
whatever you call project managers.

Planner, as it stands today, has a single hard coded
role of Manager. This is not as flexible and there
is no reason why people should not be able to create
arbitary roles.

Import/Export VCard/Contacts.
=============================
By having the human table we can thus easily import or
export vCards for humans. This allows us to quickly
build up mailing/contact lists for the project. In
past projects I've had to maintin spreadsheet documents
of email/phone/title/country/ and roles in the project.

Bill of Materials.
==================
By having the material table we can thus easily export
bills of materials (BOM). This is an essential for larger
projects. In past projects I've had to maintain separate
spread sheets of material items and their details.

Also allows us to be a bit more focused in recording
per-material properties like Import/Export, warehouse,
consumable/capital item and so on.

Different Project Terminology.
==============================
We've  had a few people talk about how they could
use planner to track their study especially for post-grad
degree. The roles are thus not "Manager", "worker" but
professor, student, tutor, postgraduate committee
members, bursar, research student, supervisor, faculty rep,
or whatever based on local terms and words.

The work (human), role and team relation will allow us to
satisy this particular market for Planner as well as any of
the many terms that you give the various people on a project.

Organisation and Teams
======================
The Team concept extends human. With this, and the fact that
a human can manage humans we could produce an organisation
chart. In many project sthe first thing we do is work out
what roles we have (usually form a template) and who manages
whom - OK maybe symptomatic of the typical people issues
you get on projects but its an important feature.

The new Account (for allocating resource costs to ledger)
would still be allocated against the resource would  not
change too. This is something new I'm working on so that
the costs could be mapped to an accounting code. In big
projects you don't just have "X" spent but the bean counters
want to know whats capital spend, whats equipment
hire, whats admin costs, whats development costs (these
are sometimes tax deducible or capitalised), whats foreign
currency. What I'm planning looks simple to do - just tag a
resource with an account and then do some subtotals by
account and report on it in the HTML export.

Attached is the rough diagram for all of this. Comments on
this please. I want to see what interest there is before I
bugzilla this as an enhancement.

The task and and resource group is the same and really doesn't
need to be changed, because it is allocated to the Resources
and not a human.

Resource is changed so you would still pick a type BUT then instead
of you typing a name manually, you get to pick either a Work
(human) or Material from their own tables. This does mean we can
now either inherit a cost or calendar or override it. The Project
will need to be altered to not have a "manager" but to simply have
allocated humans at particular (in this case non-resource) roles
(of which 1 will be a manager if this is imported from an older
Planner project). It could simplify the resource class because
it'll now shift complex things like costs and calendars away
from resource table back to the more relevant table.

I'm proposing this for Planner 1.0 or greater (probably 1.1). I
don't feel its too complicated - more a matter of shifting existing
dialogs around ;) BUT it impacts enough stuff to warrant
some real discussion first as it is a sizable chunk of work.

Rgds,
Lincoln.