One of the reasons why I love Merlin is because it is not stressing you into work the way it wants. It allows you to go your way. Take assigning tasks onto resources for example.
You have various possibilities to do so:
- You drag&drop your assignments from the resources well onto the task:
- You enable the display of ‘Assigned resources’ column and select your resource from the popup shown there:
- You select the task and call Insert > Assignment:
- You call Option Command A
- And the quicker way IMHO: You right (or ctrl) click your activity and select your resource under Assignments:
I’ve noted a (maybe) odd behavior in Merlin:
Say I have a very large project with a multidisciplinary team. The task description is relatively vague, since not everything can be broken down into very specific tasks.
If I now want to share a task between two teammembers the given work is automatically shared between the two teammembers. I can later adjust the percentages, say peron A performs 80% of that task, person B performs 20%.
The duration of the task then automatically adjusts to the time that person A needs to complete its share of the task.
However, when I delete person B from the task, there seems to be no notice, that the task is not completely covered. Once person A has completed 100% of his task it appears that the task itself has also been completed to 100% which is not true, since only the 80% assigned to A have been completed…
Am i missing something? Otherwise it would be great to add such a warning.
thanks! & great software otherwise (just beginning…)
Martin
Hi Martin, we apologize for the delayed answer– we somehow managed to oversee this comment. Sorry.
Yes, this works as implemented. When assigning a task to more than one resource, Merlin shares the work equally among assignments. If this is not wanted, you may disable the according project setting.
When removing assignments from the task, Merlin is not implemented in this way to re-adjust the assigned work, but we see your point there and forward this request therefore to the management so it be taken under consideration for feature Merlin versions.
Thanks again for your comment and have fun with Merlin 🙂
Is there any notifying feature? Say an assignee has finished the task and sat the flag to green and the completion to 100%. How can I (the owner of the project) get notified that the assignee has completed the task via email?
Thank you,
Faris
There is not such notifying feature. The assignee can update the completion percentage directly into the project, which invokes the green flag and the PM can see it.
How to assign a task and then invoke email to send out this assignment to the worker?
You cannot send automatically just this one task per email to your assigned resource by a build-in function in Merkin. What you can do is, to call file > new report > next due activities, select your resource from the options and a duration for the tasks to be reported.. Now you can send the report with all assignments of this resource for the specified duration to your resource by the use if the button ‘create e-mail’
Best regards, Vicky
The way we plan resources is based on a percentage of the time allocated to the task. For instance, if the programmed task is two weeks I would allocate 50% (i.e. 1 week) for the Director to work on it. With Merlin, if the Director resource utilisation is set to 50%, the task Activity blows out to 4 weeks. I guess the easy summary is that I do not want the resources and utilisation to modify the Task Activity duration. Is this possible? Thanks Wayne
I am not sure Wayne what you really want.
Do you want half the work on half the time, or work with half working power per day to complete the whole work?
50 % Utilization means: commit the resource with half work power on each day to this. If Work is also 100%, this will double the duration.
For half work on the same duration, You can do 50 % utilization, 50% work.
If you want your resource to do half of the work, in half of the time, you can do 100 % utilization, 50% work.
Referring to your comment 2. above, if I pick not to share task between resources, and assign 2 resources to a task, a warning comes up saying: “expected work exceeds given value”, also a warning appears on the left of the activity name.
When it comes to leveling resources, the graphic shows exceeded work as the message reads, but it is not the case. How can this be prevented and actually level the work of the resources?
>When it comes to leveling resources, the graphic shows exceeded >work as the message reads, but it is not the case.
Hmmm, if you level resources the work amount of assignments on resource A and B won’t get less. Assigned work will only get pushed in time if required. So expected work on the task remains the same, it may be the expected duration which changes.
This warning is ok, you may ignore it if you need both resources (for example two trainers) to be assigned on the same task (1 day training) producing costs calculated by the planned duration (1 day). So 2days costs in 1 day duration because of 2 trainers planned to hold one training of 1 day.
Best regards, Vicky