How can one display and manage tasks shorter than a full day in BigPicture?

[amirix]

Hi,

We have tasks that are estimated to take less than a day, for example 4 hours. 2 such tasks can fit in a single day work, but they are presented in the GUI is taking a full day each and we cannot shorten them. They automatically pop to take a full day

[Piotrek Romanczyk [SoftwarePlant]]

Hello Amir,

Thank you for your question.
Even though BigPicture has a very broad range of functionalities when it comes to 'Resources' management, it still faces some technical limitations which our dev team is trying to surmount. While looking for the best possible resolution, I believe the feature which we are planning to release in the near future and which will provide a resolution to these limitations and to the problem which you are facing, is the 'Hour Contouring'. 

The feature will expand our 'Resources' module with following capabilities:

•       Ability to create, modify and delete manual allocation contours (from now on referred to simply as “contours”) for tasks shown in Resources module.
•       Creating contours done by selecting a task and then manually specifying daily contours for selected days of a task.
•       For each of the task’s days there will be the opportunity to specify from 0 to 24 hours of allocation (in effect the mechanism will allow the user to force Resource’s over-allocation, if needed).
•       Exact precision of daily allocations - whether it is 1 hour, 10 minutes, or less – is to be decided.
•       Creating contours possible for any subset of the task’s days. For the remaining days, the standard BigPicture mechanism of even allocation will take place.
•       Show warnings in cases when, after defining contour for a task, the task is changed and the contour does not match the task appropriately. For example, if, after defining a contour, someone changes a task's start and end dates, then the contour will still be shown on that task, but along with a warning that it was defined for different task's period.

You may find more information about the 'Hour Contouring' by referring to the following backlog ticket in our Jira: https://softwareplant.com/jira/browse/BIGPICTURE-2940 (please make sure to open it in your browser's 'Incognito Mode'). Beside the detailed description with examples, you may find the video on how the feature will work.
Please let me know if there's anything else I could help you with.

Kind Regards,
Piotrek of SoftwarePlant Support Team

[amirix]

Thanks, I hope it will be fixed soon, as it considerably affects our ability to adopt the add-on.

[Jason]

Has this been fixed?

[Stine Søndergaard]

@amirixdid you ever find a good way to solve this issue? (:

We have more than 4000 tasks - many less than a standard JIRA day. This will show the overall schedule to be completely wrong as each small task will take up a full day.

A duration of one month is shown in the schedule to take three months instead. This is completely impossible to plan with and completely defies the purpose of a gantt planning tool!

/Stine

[amirix]

I am interested in knowing the real date the program and its milestones shall end. Currently, this small example shows that the tasks will take 2 calendar days (as they depend on each other), where the truth is that both will end in the same day.

(Resource allocation as I saw as available in other screen, though I would be happy to clearly see over-allocation also on the Gantt itself)

[Ericka Samuels]

change the link type to 'end to end'

[amirix]

Thanks, this will solve the issue. But this is still a workaround forcing me to to create false ties between issues and handle them manually. I may also miss some issues when they estimated efforts change. I hope they will get to fix this soon.

[Piotrek Romanczyk [SoftwarePlant]]

I'm convinced, that the workaround proposed by Ericka should do the trick for now.

[Piotrek Romanczyk [SoftwarePlant]]

Though, as you mentioned Amir, it may require an implementation of the improvement I've described before, to get rid of these limitations you are facing now.

[Ericka Samuels]

but WHY do you want to do this?

if you are only interested in showing on what day the task will complete, then it doesn't matter if it's done at 10am , 2pm, or 5pm.

if you want 2 tasks to end on the same day then use the end to end link, or no link at all.

the only reason to know that a task takes < 1 day is to properly represent the resource consumption 

I'm so sorry, I think I must be missing part of the problem here.

are you letting BG derive  the end date based on resource availability plus the level of effort (in jira, the original estimate field)?  if not, then just set the end date absolutely and set the task type to 'manual' or 'lock'.

[amirix]

Imagine that I had 4 tasks in my program, each estimated to take a full day. depending on each other. i.e., end-to-start relation.

Along the way it was discovered that they will take only half a day each. I update the estimation in the JIRA issue.

but now my program is showed to take more time than it really does. You can magnify this problem depending of the size of the project.

Coming from MS project, successors and predecessors is the correct way to link tasks. this feature exists also in BigPicture. Not using it means that my program is build on the wrong skeleton and is not flexible to changes (since I will need to manually examine each changed task, and manually play with links to correct the problem)

[gregwing_mrmc]

Has this been fixed yet? This is a fundamental flaw in the system and has been hanging around for 3 years

[Ericka Samuels]

are you more interested in knowing the date (in absolute terms) that the task will be completed by?  or are you more interested in knowing an allocated resource is available for 4 more hours?

a task, regardless if it takes 2 , 4 , or 8 hrs still ends up being done at the end of the day.

so what are you trying to show? the day it will be done?