Mystical, isn’t it?
Yesss…
That a few light clicks from your wand can afford you so much scheduling power.
It’s extraordinary, really.
But how does one control this power… this… magic?
Well, I will show you… if you’ll follow me, on a little journey…
yes… to a quaint little village in Middle Earth, where my Hobbit friends are busy scurrying
about… planning all manner of town projects...
where they, too, experienced some amount of, shall we say… difficulty…
in getting their project schedules in proper order.
You see, just a short time ago here in The Shire, my happy little friends lacked the
very concept of effort-driven and non-effort-driven tasks.
The effect?
Oh…
I’d say this little bit of confusion led to some quite interesting Microsoft Project
schedules.
A-hem, perhaps the word, interesting, is a bit of an inappropriate description.
Rather, inaccurate, imprecise, or simply erroneous, might better suit the state of these schedules.
Let’s take a look at a couple of tasks in one of Mr. Baggins’ project schedules, and
I’ll explain the sorcery behind commanding tasks to behave as you intend them to behave
when adding your workers to them.
Observe the 2 tasks in this schedule: One, the “Paint the walls in the Town Hall”
task, and the other, “Learn to properly patch a thatched roof.”
Double-tapping my wand on the first task and clicking the Advanced tab reveals that this
task has the Effort-Driven spell cast upon it, see here?
This Effort-Driven spell decrees that any additional Hobbit added to this task will
be able to share an amount of the task’s planned labor, thus potentially reducing the
total time it will take for the task to reach its outcome.
From the Resource tab, I’ll add another Hobbit, full time, and click OK.
Behold!
The decrease in duration from 4 days to 2 days evidences the effectiveness of the Effort-Driven
spell.
Powerful magic, indeed, wouldn’t you agree?
It does stand to reason that the more Hobbits you have painting a room, the hastier the
task will complete.
Subsequently, double-tapping my wand on the second task reveals that it does NOT have
the Effort-Driven spell cast upon it.
As you are likely to infer… without this spell… adding another Hobbit to a task will
NOT reduce the task work, but will instead actually compound the amount of labor associated
to the task.
You see, it takes a Hobbit 8 full hours of instruction to gain this thatched roof patching
knowledge, and adding extra Hobbits to the task only incurs additional Hobbit-hours for
the task.
Oh, if only adding a Hobbit to the “Learn to properly patch a thatched roof” task
would allow the Hobbits to share the learning, thereby allowing said learning to occur in
but half the time.
But alas… that magic is beyond even my abilities.
Well, I must be off.
But, I do hope you can add this new-found magic to your own bag of tricks.
Do also understand, however, that there is more magic to be wielded at your command.
You’ll need to come to understand Task Types, if you truly want to sharpen your Microsoft
Project scheduling wizardry.
Look to the elves at EPMA for this elusive knowledge.
…and tell them Gandalf sent you!