When managing a project with Merlin you create your tasks and assign them to your resources. As your resources work on their task, you as a PM update your project by entering the actual values. That means, you enter the percentage of the completed work and the actual start date. If updating the tasks in absolute mode, you can enter the actual work or remaining work and duration.

Next time the resource works on the task, and reports its progress to update the data, you enter the new ‘% complete’ and if updating the tasks in absolute mode, the amount of actual work and remaining work so far.

Some users however would like to be able to pause the works on a task, to plan the remaining work sometime later on. This is also a good idea, if wanting to vary the utilization of a resource on a task in time.  So to do so in Merlin, you would need to create two tasks. One for the first part of the works on the task, and a second for the remaining.

To quicken this procedure, we wrote an applescript sample which requires Merlin 2.8.4 or newer, and creates the two sub-activities based on the planned and actual values of the task in progress.

If interested, feel free to download, use or modify as you like.  Continue reading →