Merlin: plan by work or duration

Now and then we get asked in support, when to plan Merlin activities by work and when by duration.

Some pose their question a bit differently, they define the activity’s work, assign two or more resources on it and email us to ask why the activity’s duration got shorter.

When using Merlin to plan your projects, there are various planing scenarios. You will find some basic configuration examples with details and screenshots here.

When it comes to the point where you assign activities to resources, it helps to know, that there is a project setting called ‘resources share their work’ which is enabled by default. You will find it under File > Project Settings > Misc > Resources >

ResourcesShareTheirWork

As long as this setting is enabled on your project, whenever you assign two resources to the same task, their work would be 50% of the work defined on the activity each so the activity itself would take half the time to be accomplished.

There are cases where you need this, for example: two painters paint the same wall on half of the time.

There are cases however where you don’t need this. You have a training planned for 1 day and have two trainers. The training won’t stop at midday, both of the trainers will be there for the complete day.

To plan this activity, you simply define it by duration and blank work entries on the activity and assignments.

ScheduledByDurationOnly

 

 

Applescript – elapsed duration in human friendly time units

When planing and managing your projects with Merlin for Mac OS X you have 4 main windows: Activities, Resources, Netplan, Utilization.

Depending on the view you have selected, the main area offers you different details and information about your project. You can view and in certain cases modify the main outline of your project, adding activities, groups and milestones. Furthermore, this area also allows you to work interactively with the Gantt chart, Netplan and resource utilization.

Per default the label in the Gantt bar show the expected duration in working times. So it may show 2 days for example for a task starting Friday and ending Monday if weekend is defined to be workfree time.

If you want the label in the Gantt to show the real time elapsed, you may do so. Just go to View > Show View Options > Styles
Click into the label you want to edit and select “expected elapsed duration” for its content.

This of course would then show the duration in e-units. What to do if you don’t want those edays, emonths, eweeks to be shown? You may use attached script sample created in AppleScript.

It goes throught all activities of the top most opened project, checks for the expected elapsed duration of the task, and writes it in the subtitle field in human friendly units. If you enable the display of “subtitle” for the label, you are set.

Note: The script cannot create a live connection between the columns “subtitle” and “expected elapsed duration”. That is, before printing your project, make sure you call the script again Gantt  to actualize outputted data. Continue reading