I would like to be able to create project plans that allow me to estimate and plan with time, but in two ways:
- Duration of tasks
- Actual work time on tasks
What's the difference? Not everything needs hands-on time. A task might need only 1 hour of hands-on time but might span 3 days. Maybe we need to wait for someone to get back to us. Maybe we can only put in a few minutes at a time here and there. Back in my lab days, I used to do cold beer filtration and bacterial challenges that would last for weeks, but most of that time I was letting it run on its own. I need to schedule its start and end on a calendar, but also I might need to estimate the amount of hands-on, aka timesheet or billable time, needed to perform the task.
Ideally, I want to have ticket structures, so that I have an epic representing a milestone, and then standard issues within the epic with dependencies with an original set of estimated durations serving as the baseline, and then as the project moves on and end dates change, dates shift accordingly, automatically. This should not affect effort estimates, which will be tracked on their own.
Is this possible? Is it possible with Advanced Roadmaps? If not, what other tools could provide this functionality?
Before it comes up, this isn't a sprint-related idea, and a solution does not have to adhere to the dogma and scripture of any methodology. For this particular scenario, I'm simply tracking when things are initially projected to be done vs when they are actually done, and I need to track both how long the task takes and how much actual work was done.
