Sum of Child Time Required

[danie...@gmail.com]

Hello!

I would like a parent item to display the sum of its children's "Time Required Max" fields. I'm wanting to have items within a project have individual time estimates that I can view a summary of at the project/parent level.

Does this functionality exist, or do you recommend a better approach?

Thank you,

Daniel

[Alyona (MLO Support)]

Hello,

If you convert a parent task to a project, MLO will show you the total time based on the "Time Required Max" values of the subtasks.

[Laurence Glazier]

Thank you, Alyona, I think I can use this technique for financial budgeting too, which I queried in the forum recently. A specific currency field would be nice, as hear I would have to use the Hours field, or else be limited to 60. Perhaps it could have a checkbox to optionally inherit the total from subitems.

[Maximilian Hantsch-Köller]

Well honestly, I had thought a while ago it would be great to be able to sum any kind of time or number field to the next higher level. Next higher level could be anything like:

- project

- outline level (parent-child)

- groups (in todo views)

Such a feature could be used for multiple things:

- adding times to find out how much all of these tasks take

- adding cost to find out how much all of these items cost

- adding story points to see how much was in a backlog, a release, or a sprint (you could use MLO to organize your backlog for Scrum)

Now we'd also need custom fields for cost, and story points, and release, and sprint number, and maybe whatever else people come up with ;-)

Max

[David Timpe]

I feel strongly about this too.  At a minimum, the TimeRequiredMin and TimeRequiredMax fields should roll up in views.  It would be incredible to be able to define some number of attribute fields and have some level of control over how the fields work - rules or formulas of some type.  

[danie...@gmail.com]

Alyona,

The parent project's "Time Required Max" column does not represent the sum of its child's' combined "Time Required Max" fields. Is there some way a folder or project can display the sum of its child's "Time Required Max" fields summed as a column?

Thanks,

Daniel

[Alyona (MLO Support)]

At this time it is not possible to represent the sum of subtasks' "Time Required Max" fields in the column next to the parent project. The only way to see the sum is to open the parent project's properties.

[danie...@gmail.com]

Alyoona,

Alright, thank you for your time and help!

Best,

Daniel

[Darryl Brooks]

I was looking for the same thing and found it, but if the project is 58% complete, why doesn't the status change to In Progress?

[Alyona (MLO Support)]

The Project status is user controlled and not system controlled. We believe that the user has their own direct input into whether a Project is viewed as Not Started, In Progress, Suspended or Completed.

Here is an example: you could have a subtask under a Project heading that states "Create Project Overview Notes’ or "Plan Phase 2 of Project" etc. These tasks might be related to the Project overall but aren’t really part of the Project. If you complete these tasks, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that you had started working on the actual Project itself. In order to define the Project as started you have to manually change the status to "In Progress", in order to mark it once done you need to change the status to "Completed" and so on.