Updating Resource Manager when tasks are completed early?

Tony Platts

I have a number of project plans where someone has completed a task early. For example, we estimated a Technical Consultant would take 6 weeks to meet with various teams. He completed the task in 4 weeks and marked the task complete. The task now shows in the Capacity Plan for the next two weeks, showing that he has no availability.

How are people managing this? Are they going back into each task in the project plan and amending the end date?

Similarly, I completed a task on a project yesterday. It was planned for next week but I had time spare. It's still showing that I need to complete it next Tuesday. I don't want to change too much because the dependant tasks, are planned for Wednesday and Thursday.

Any thoughts on how to manage this quickly and efficiently?

JamesB

@Tony Platts

I have this same issue with RM. In our instance, I have the Project Owners update the end date of the task that is complete to the actual completion date. You are correct though that this does cause an issue with the overall plan when you are using predecessors because it will change the dates of linked tasks. Hopefully as SS continues the development work on the integration between RM and SS it will be able to look at status or percent complete as a marker for resource planning and management.

Brian_Richardson

With dependencies enabled, Smartsheet manages the start and end dates internally based on predecessors, so you cannot do automations and formulas to those columns. That's kindof the point… if you're using predecessors the main point of that is so that your schedule will adjust down the line when a task changes. So, your consultant needs to amend the end date to reflect the date that the task actually completed, rather than just marking complete and walking away.

If you don't want the tasks to shift automatically based on predecessors, then you can manage the tasks more easily by turning off dependencies in the settings. If you do that, then the date columns become formula-capable and available to automations, so you could have an automation adjust the end date to the date that someone marked the task as complete.

jduran

Disabling dependencies will also disable resource manager on the sheet, plus it will turn off critical path calculations, so tasks on the critical path will no longer be known.

As an alternative, you can take a page from Critical Chain methodology and recognize tasks with uncertainty in time to complete (typical in longer duration tasks) as having a baseline resource task time and a resource buffer time. This will maintain both your critical path and correctly adjust the future capacity plan to account for the early finish.

To accomplish this in the plan,

1. Split the original task A into two tasks, “task A” and “resource buffer task A”,
2. Split the assigned resource’s time proportionally between these two tasks, 
3. Link the new “resource buffer task A” with a finish-to-start predecessor relationship to task A,
4. Change the successor task’s predecessor to be the new “resource buffer task A” (with a F-S relationship), this will maintain the existing critical path.

If the baseline task is completed early, the time allocated in the “resource buffer task A” is not needed, so you can remove the resource that is assigned in the resource buffer task by deleting the resource from the task.  This frees up the resource’s future time in the capacity plan in RM, but maintains the rest of the start/end times on your project’s critical path, that is, if you don’t want to finish early or it is impossible for other resources on the critical path to start earlier than planned.

To avoid confusion for the resource in the tasks they see assigned to them, instead of calling it “resource buffer task A”, you can slightly alter the task name, e.g., “task_A, so as not to confuse the resource. The PM will know the buffer task purpose, but it will be essentially invisible to the resource, esp., if you make the switch time correspond to a new timesheet week. Of course, all the time reported in RM will still roll-up to the project seamlessly.

Brian_Richardson

Great idea!

Another approach is to use Data Mesh (if you have it) to adjust the date for you. You cannot use a formula or automation directly in the End Date if dependencies are enabled, however you could watch for Completed and have an Automation post the completed date into another column. Then, Data Mesh the date from the Completed Date column into the End Date.

Of course this relies on having Data Mesh addon. If you don’t have it, I highly suggest looking into it. Its very powerful.

Tony Platts

The problem that I have with this is that the word "Smartsheet" is becoming synonymous with the word "Workaround" for me. There's always a way to get things done if you're willing to change the way you managed projects, manually adjust things throughout the project, or have 17 different helper rows.

What we really need is a tickbox that says "Hide Completed Items" within Resource Manager.

I think the easiest way around this is an automation that says "when %complete is set to 100% AND due date is in the future, set %allocation to 0%." It will break other stuff but at least it will stop my team complaining (rightly) that they can't trust Resource Managers schedule because it continues to show tasks after they complete them.

Tony Platts

Oh no. Ignore me. This then breaks the %age work complete on the project.

/sigh

There's never an easy way around these things.

Brian_Richardson

Yeah it gets frustrating to hit the limits. Only thing I can say is, I've been working on project management tools and implementing them for 12 years, and Smartsheet is the most robust and customizable solution that does not require IT specialists to implement, nor pay $1M a year to run.

In that time I have not found any single tool that has no limits or does things exactly the way we want them to be done. But the value of Smartsheet is that it does so much more than project management… you can throw tons of other processes at it and run them effectively.

I really do suggest looking into the Advanced packages, as it seems you have needs beyond the core application. They are relatively affordable and open a world of additional automation and customization.