Allocated Time % versus Duration

David Bushman

I'm also a newcomer to smartsheet, but this funtionalty is critical.  Adding a resource at 50% was one of the first things I tried, and expected the duration to double.  It's difficult to see the effect of an assigned resources on the schedule without it.  Furthermore, need the efforts of tasks to roll up, as it does with duration.  Please fix this.  This thread has been ging since 2015.  

Ben Potter

My company ( a material handling machinery manufacturer) has recently started using SmartSheet and see it as an excellent tool to further company growth, management oversight, and customer communication.  We have begun implimenting it in nearly every aspect of our management and planning, EXCEPT for actual resource allocation.  We have, at any given time, 60-80 live projects. Of those, 20-25 require extensive engineering interaction and support.  We have 8 Project Engineers, each spreading their time amongst multiple projects.  The work allocation % per day plays a huge part in project planning as we have man-hour goals and restrictions per month

Long story short, at this time we still have to use MS Project to allot man-hours.  It would be great if SmartSheet would be able to better show Duration as it relates to Allocation % and hours.  8 hours of work at 50% allocation is 2 days.  We would love to see this function implemented so that we can step away from MS Project completely.

Andi Viola

It's been a month since anyone has commented, so I wanted to add a comment that this would be incredibly beneficial for my company to have this functionality on SmartSheet as well. 

Shaine Greenwood

Hi All—

 

I've got your votes down for a way to track project effort (person hours with Effort = Duration * Number or Percent of Resources Allocated) and for this automatically adjust the duration of the task based on modifyin the % allocation.

 

Thanks for your feedback!

JonnyPoe

Please add my vote for this! I thought I had a workaround for creating a cacluated field and then assigning the duration, but after assigning the duration to the column the formula gets deleted and becomes a value.

Joe Gottlieb

I found this thread while trying to solve a different but related problem. I am interrested in leveraging the Allocation % of a task to reweight the row for purposed of calculating a more accurate % Complete for any ancestor rows. I am starting to dive into the laborious logic needed that will involve the CHILDREN function and probably AVGW, but can anyone suggest a simple way to do this? 

Tom Robson

Has this bug been resolved yet? The original question was posed almost two years a ago; see below:

 

Can anyone tell me the correlation between Allocated Time % versus task duration?  If I estimate that a task will take 2 days (16 working hours) to complete but then assign someone to it that only can work on it 50% of the time, why will the system automatically create a start and end dates that are consecutive days?  Since the person can only work on the task 50% of the time, should it not take 4 days actually to complete working 4 hours per day?  Please tell me what I am missing.

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Tom,

 

This is expected behavior in the application, not a bug.

 

Our Product team would love to hear your story and use case for this type of feature. We have a new method for submitting your enhancement request. Check out our announcement on this for more information: https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/new-way-submit-your-feature-requests

rsiemer13056

Here's another vote for integrating this functionality. This is super-important for the kind of project management I do.

I did figure out a workaround but it presently involves some manual adjustment initially and more manual adjustment if changes are made subsequently: 

I added Estimated Time (ET), % Allocation (%A) and Duration Check (DC) columns. I enter values in the ET and %A columns and the DC column compares the difference between the Duration column and the product of ET and %A. I added conditional formatting to show if there's a negative value which means the Duration is less than DC. I then manually change the Duration to make it a positive value.

I attached an image that shows the formula. Seems like if I can figure it out, it would be easy to code but I'm definitely no programmer.

Laura

I want to be able to at least have the option to control Duration or/and End Date from Allocation %. Currently, changing the Allocation % doesn't change the end date and duration on our sheet. We have to manually do the math and change.. which takes more time so it would be nice to have an automatic change. Or again, at least the OPTION.  

JustinS

I understand the position that this is not a bug, it's a PM feature that has not been programmed yet. Are there any updates on the roadmap for this? It's a fairly standard PM process, especially for a "portfolio view" of projects.

Could you give us an update please?

 

msimpson

This is yet another upvote for what is a very, VERY basic feature: that the duration take into account the resource allocation percentage. I just purchased smartsheet and am shocked that after >> 1 year of when this feedback was first raised it has yet to be implemented!!!!!! 

AndyP

I'd like to upvote this too.

We just joined with 100+ people to schedule and I'd agree that this is expected functionality.

Laura

Following up ---

 

Whats it looking like for Smartsheet to add "Effort" tracking? Also, for Duration to auto-adjust based on Allocation % being adjusted? 

Robin Sherwood

Thanks everyone for the feedback. 

As a product we are always looking for that line where easy-to-use meets highly-functional. When I ask customers if they track effort and duration separately,  about 30% say yes, but for the other 70% the question doesn't even make sense; effort and duration are the same thing. This later group is less likely to have experience with robust scheduling tools like Microsoft Project. 

Currently Smartsheet does not track effort separate from duration, nor does the product support the concept of "Task types" which is what Microsoft project calls the myriad of auto-calculation options for changing task properties. Both of these concepts are powerful, but task types complicate the user experience for less formal project managers. 



At this time we don't have plans to support things like "Fixed Work, Fixed Work (effort driven), Fixed Units, or Fixed Duration (effort driven)" tasks. We support Fixed Duration (non-effort driven). Based on user feedback we will likely add support for Effort tracking, and when we do that we would like to automatically update % allocation. Resource management as a whole is something we would like to revisit, but neither RM or Effort are committed to development for 2017 due to competing priorities. Hopefully some of this work will start in 2018.