For more control of task dates

Often a project manager needs more control of his schedule, in particular, the dates. For example, a vendor contract could be only for three months. All tasks assigned to this vendor need to be completed in those three months. For manually scheduled tasks, Celoxis does not change the dates on them.

How does it work?

For a manually scheduled task, Celoxis manages all the resource assignments within the task dates. To better understand the nature of these 'date bound' tasks, let's take some examples.

Joe will do support in the month of April for 25% of his working time. What this implies is that Joe will not do support on holidays and weekends. Also, if Joe remains absent on a few days, he will NOT compensate it in May. This is like an ongoing activity with fixed allocation but variable effort.
Peter and Jack will build a wall starting on 1^st April and finish it on 30^th April. The effort of 100 hours divided as 60 hours for Peter and 40 hours for Jack. This is a time bound activity with fixed effort per resource.

In both the above examples, the nature of effort involved is different due to the nature of the activity itself. This is reflected through the resource allocation, which is either done in % (fixed allocation) or in hours(fixed effort).

You can place a manually scheduled task anywhere in your plan, and Celoxis won't move it. This new feature gives the project manager greater flexibility and control over planning and managing their schedule. To change the default scheduling on a task, you can either edit the task directly or add the Manually Scheduled column on the Interactive Gantt.

For manually scheduled tasks, you cannot specify duration or work. Work is auto computed based on how the resource is allocated:

If allocation specified in %: work = sum (total-working-time-for-nth-resource * allocation-for-nth-resource)
If allocation specified in hours: work = sum(hours for each resource)

Dependencies can be specified for such tasks. However adding a dependency will not shift dates. Dependencies are only 'FYI'.

Resource exceptions within the task dates will be honored. In case of allocation in hours, it will be apportioned, while in case of allocation in %, it will be simply dropped. For example, A task is scheduled to start on 5^th May and finish on 9^th May. A resource is assigned to this task who has a day-off on 7^th May.

If this resource is assigned for 100%, his assignment for 7^th May will be simply dropped, since he is not available. Total work will be 32 hours (4 * 8)
If this resource is assigned for 20 hours, his assignment for 7^th May will be apportioned across the remaining (available) days. Work will be 20 hours. His allocation will be 5 hours each for the other available days.

If work/effort changes, then estimated costs, hours, billing will be recomputed as appropriate.

The Start/Finish dates of summary tasks is computed from their child /sub-tasks.

Things to remember

Manually scheduled tasks will not allocate resources on non-working days. You can add working exception for the resource if you want the allocation to be done on that day.
If there is no overlap between task date/time and assigned resource's working time, then a warning will be shown to the project manager when making the assignment. For example, if a task is scheduled from 8 AM to 12 PM and a resource whose working time is 1 PM to 5 PM is assigned to it, then it will warn the manager.

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