Automatic change of work schedule, if we have a delay. Gantt Chart

pawel lech

Hey. I am a beginner in Jira, and I have a problem. At work we use the Gantt chart plugin. I was able to create a Gantt chart based on required tasks, adding a new task or subtask in the 'Original Estimate' introduce hourly value needed for the task. Employees change job status to 'In Progress', add logs of work, comments etc. An employee working too slowly (logs too little time), there is a delay - and this is a problem. Our schedule did not 'extend' (tasks are linked relationship - has to be done after). If one of the tasks is to delay other tasks not change their dates (the 'building blocks' in the chart do not move).

We receive only the information (delayed task is red and the message: 180% allocated work).

Please help, how to properly configure. It is possible that something wrong or do I setup an error adding tasks.

Thank you for your help.
Best wishes.

Frank Polscheit

That's a conceptual problem, which your project manager has to handle or yourself if that's your job: I will try to explain the main idea behind. If somebody logs too little time, that user seems to work on other topics and it's the task of the project manager to control and steer that to focus on the proper issues. If someone spends more time on an issue than estimated, the estimation might be wrong (collect infos and build statistics to extract a correction factor for the future): as project manager you have to react. One possibility is to simply shift the planned end date into the future, but sometimes you cannot do that as your boss or your customer would not accept that (deliver a Christmas tree end of January is not an option). So, you might re-assign that task to a more experienced team member to work faster in order to catch the goal/end date or you split the task into multiple subtask assigning to different team members to be worked in parallel. Or you prescribe weekend work or extra-hours per day to reach the planned end date without shifting it. Many possibilities and not a single approach fitting for all scenarios: a human has to think about external conditions and (internal) politics to find the proper way of handling such situation.

The Gantt-Chart add-on gives the necessary hints to focus on that situation(s): yellow Gantt bar if sum of logged work plus remaining estimation exceed original estimation and red if sum of logged work exceeds original estimation. Depending of your choice to solve this problem within your project, you have to reflect that within JIRA. If you decide to prolongate the planned end date, than you have to shift the issue's end date within edit-mode of Gantt-Chart or edit the custom field "planned end date" within JIRA natively. All dependent issues will be updated accordingly by the add-on.

Kind regards,
Frank