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Good morning,

This time I'm trying to work with time allocation and cannot find a way to do it.

This is what I'm trying to do : there's a task lasting 28 hours. Libreplan automatically schedules it in a 3 days block (no problem here). What I need is to spread this work over 3 different weeks (ie : 14 hours week 22, 7 hours week 23, 7 hours week 24).

What I did :

  1. assigned a resource to the task in the planning view
  2. right clicked on the task to switch to "advanced allocation"
  3. changed zoom to week
  4. Changed function to manual

And there I'm stuck because I can only change number of hours for the week that was originally planned by the system. I can add 14 to W22, but it's cannot write anything into the other weeks.

I'm sure I managed to do it once, but cannot remember how !

If you could help (again).

Many thanks ! Ben

Advanced allocation

asked Jun 15 '12 at 05:25

ben119's gravatar image

ben119
214712


Hi Ben,

currently the Advanced Allocation does not let change neither the start date nor the end date of a task. The reason is that to implement this was not regarded as indispensable and, at the same time, doing it had a lot of effort associated.

  • The big effort is because if we allow to change the start and end date of tasks in the Advanced Allocation, many times this implies to launch a sequence of movements and reallocations in other tasks of the project. This is so because the tasks have dependencies according to the project Gantt chart and the dependencies must be enforced.
  • It is not indispensable because the start-end date of a task can be adjusted through the Project Scheduling perspective in the allocation pop-up.

So, you can wonder, how do I change the start/end date of a task in the Project Scheduling perspective? Well, to achieve that you have to open the allocation pop-up of the task and you must configure one of the allocation strategies. In two of the three existent allocations strategies this is possible. To wit:

  • Calculate number of hours. You can specify the workable (weekdays) duration of the task and playing with them you can choose the right end date.
  • Calculate resources per day. In this strategy you also can specify the planned workable days of the task.

I would like also to highlight a behavior of the program: If you modify the allocation of a task modifying its allocation through the Advance Allocation perspective, this sets the task as manually allocated and sets in the task a constraint START-IN-FIXED-DATE. On setting this constraint the task is not affected by the dependencies from then on unless the user changes again the allocation function from manual to flat and, after this, changes the positioning constraint to any of the other constraint types (AS-SOON-AS-POSSIBLE, NOT-SOONER-THAN, NOT-LATER-THAN or AS-LATE-AS-POSSIBLE). This is done in this way because, on analyzing this behavior, we wonder how the program should reallocate a task with a manual allocation on needing to move it. Really, there is not a good way to do it and it is very difficult that the program can guess what the user wants to do in the new allocation date. This is so because the manual allocation, by definition, is only valid for the current position in time in which it has been configured. In another point in time the calendar is different and, hence, just copying the manual allocation to a new point does not work. It would assign hours in weekends, in weekdays in which it is not wished...

Therefore, being aware of this trouble, the tactic that was decided to follow in LibrePlan was to anchor the tasks manually allocated in time no to lose the configuration done by the user. By doing this, the manual configuration of the allocation is never lost and the user can move the task but only after supervising and accepting it explictily by the interface as explained before (removing the manual allocation function and, afterwards, changing the START-IN-FIXED-DATE constraint).

I hope it is a bit more clear now :)

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answered Jun 18 '12 at 11:49

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jmoran
64624

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Asked: Jun 15 '12 at 05:25

Seen: 407 times

Last updated: Jun 18 '12 at 11:49

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