Start task when one of 3 preceding tasks is ready

[Emiliano Heyns]

Hi,

3 of my team members are going on a course, and I need to start a follow-up task with that resource as soon as that member finished the course, no matter which of the 3. Is this schedulable with taskjuggler?

Emile

[Bas de Bruijn]

Hi Emile,

you can make a task "course" with a specific end time and let the task start depending on the end of the course. Then add your resources to your task and you have limited your resources not to start before the end of the course.

You can also add a leave period to your resources where the will not be available during the course period.

Bas

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[Emiliano Heyns]

The thing is it's a self-study course, and I want the first that finishes it to kick off the dependent task. I don't know exactly when each course will end until it has been scheduled. The dependent task requires a skill rather than a person, and the first to supply the skill gets scheduled.

[Bas de Bruijn]

This is not much info for your schedule, i would make your task depending on 3 milestones (your skilled persons) and when you have more info on their expexted end date you can set the date of the milestones. You can prepare your plan but it is depending on the info you feed it with... It's alive :)

Op 11 mrt. 2013 16:45 schreef "Emiliano Heyns" <emilian...@iris-advies.com> het volgende:

[Emiliano Heyns]

So what you're saying is that it's not possible to do this :-) No worries, just needed to know whether I could avoid hard coding dependencies in this instance. The thing for me is that the courses are generally low priority, I currently just need *one* of them to finish to satisfy the task dependency, the rest can go months later if dependency demands.

[Bas de Bruijn]

Hi,
Maybe i don't understand your question or exact need. I would advise not to make it too complicated. In the end your 3 resources get "magically" transformed at some point in time to other persons with much more skills :) that's the way i see it. That's why i would use said construction.

Op 11 mrt. 2013 21:45 schreef "Emiliano Heyns" <emilian...@iris-advies.com> het volgende:

[Bas de Bruijn]

Extra thought:
Why not make a team "skill x" and add the persons who have done their course to the team the day they finished it? Assign the task to that team.

Op 11 mrt. 2013 22:45 schreef "Bas de Bruijn" <baslu...@gmail.com> het volgende:

[Emiliano Heyns]

That's what I meant by hard-coding. When they get magically transformed is determined in part when priority allows them to do this course. I could schedule the plan until I see that one has finished and then just hard-code the dependency on that person, but if anything changes (the plan is alive after all) I'd have to do that again to see if that assumption still holds; it's somewhat brittle. But it'll have to be workable.

Thanks,

Emile

[Emiliano Heyns]

I understand that, but who gets to do the course when is determined in part of other responsibilities they have. I would have loved to see the scheduler take care of this; the proposed alternate is to step in for the scheduler. Which is fine, but as mentioned before, it's somewhat brittle.

[Bas de Bruijn]

Ok, i understand, so why not let taskjuggler schedule the 3 courses, make your task dependant of those 3? Just answered above question myself i think... It would probably schedule the task after the last one has finished (person1 and person2 and person3) instead of any (person1 or person2 or person3). My knowledge stops here. Would it be possible to make something like an "or" dependancy? I hope you nail it.
Bas

Op 11 mrt. 2013 22:56 schreef "Emiliano Heyns" <emilian...@iris-advies.com> het volgende:

[Emiliano Heyns]

Bingo. I did in fact schedule it that way, and that's near a worst case scenario for my schedule; a task that's unnecessarily delayed by a crucial month because one of the nonessential team members for the purposes of this task is only allowed to work on my project 2 days a week.

This may well be an edge case for taskjuggler, but it's unfortunately somewhat typical for my projects. Team members work on multiple projects, are allocated on specific days of the week in some cases, and I need to schedule on skill rather than on person; the person is more often than not the outcome of this process, not the input. To make it even more complex, I would actually have to schedule for skill+efficiency; person 1 and person 2 may both be capable of doing one same task, but person 2 might be twice as efficient at it. So the effort of a task would depend on who gets allocated.

But hey, the mere fact I'm contemplating these scenarios speaks to the power of taskjuggler. To do what I need to do in ms project...

[Brendan Hyland]

Perhaps setting the project resources up a different way may work... for
example, you could have a set of 'role' macros in an include file that
assign resources, something like:

#use like ${AllocJuggler "10h" "2h"}
macro AllocJuggler [
flags juggling
allocate Jim
effort ${1}
limits { weeklymax ${2} }
]

Then you put together your project using roles instead of assigning
resources, and as the project progresses you can change who gets which
role as your needs require. This also allows you to have Jim as both a
mechanic and as a juggler, but then as his mechanic role becomes busier
you can change who's the juggler (in only one place), or add alternates
and limits to AllocJuggler as necessary. Having a flag in there means
you can also report by role.

Brendan

[Emiliano Heyns]

That doesn't take into account that not everyone can work on the same days. I think that pre-scheduling and hard-coding is going to have to do it for now; when I have some spare time (...) I'll see if it can be done with manageable change to TJ.

Thanks,

Emile

[Bas de Bruijn]

Hi Emile,
I'm interested in your results. If it would be possible to make decisions on dependancies (task a ready or (task b and task c both reafy)) then i could schedule a "plan B" with other tasks than the original plan. This opposed to scenarios with same tasks and dependencies. Hope you get some spare time :)
Bas

Op 12 mrt. 2013 12:44 schreef "Emiliano Heyns" <emilian...@iris-advies.com> het volgende:

That doesn't take into account that not everyone can work on the same days. I think that pre-scheduling and hard-coding is going to have to do it for now; when I have some spare time (...) I'll see if it can be done with manageable change to TJ.

Thanks,

Emile