Resource planning - Due Date vs Time frame to complete work

I’ve run across this issue and was curious how others are dealing with it.

I am trying to do resource planning and project prioritization. For us a “project” could be one task… I want to be able to take a new project - find time in the calendar for this task and assign it to a team member. Basically find blocks of time I can insert new work into.

The challenge I have is that if I’m looking at the calendar or even the timeline the dates are generally due dates and they show on the calendar/timeline as a due date. So we can’t say I’m working on this task Monday-Wed and its due Friday - don’t schedule anything for me Monday-Wed…

The two options I think I have are create hundreds of projects with a due date and create tasks that have date ranges to represent days the work will be performed. As I mentioned, our “projects” are tend to be one or two tasks that can take a day or two to complete - so this isn’t optimum.

The second option is to create a task (with a due date) and sub tasks to represent the blocks of time when the work will get done - this doesn’t seem optimum either.

What I’d like to see is a task can have a due date AND a date range to perform the work
I think that solves my scenario.

Anyone have similar challenge?

Thanks
Keith

Hi @Keith_Schuster

What about having the Task have a start and due date of Monday-Wednesday as that is the main working task and then a milestone sub-task due Friday, you then can also home that sub-task into the project to appear on the calendar.

The trick will be coming up with a way to clearly identify the Milestone task from the doing task.

A new Date Custom Field will be available soon which may also be a solution…

Hope that helps.

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I hear what you’re saying – I just hate adding more tasks, in this case just to indicate a due date.

I went looking for a custom field – glad a date type is being added – that’s not perfect but gets me closer -thanks

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Create one specific “projects” project in which you assemble all the tasks that are related to a project.

Create one specific “planning” project in which you assemble all the tasks that are related to “blocks of time”.

Add sub-tasks to your “project” tasks = they are your blocks of time. You can add these sub-tasks to the “planning” project in which you can use the timeline to visualize or plan these blocks of time.

Hope that helps.

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