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Enter time against task, not users

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    Hi everyone,

    We are currently having a discussion on how to go about some tasks that aren't based on effort but on duration. Let's say a meeting. When we create the task in timetask, we estimate 1 hour (duration of the task) and assign the task to X number of attendees.

    In that situation, the task is 1 hour but after each of the attendees adding their time, there's a deviation on the actual hours (estimated time ==> 1 hour vs actual time ==> X attendees * 1 hour).

    We seem to miss a field that states the duration of the task, regardless of how many hours are billed against it (based on number of resources assigned to the task).

    Are we missing anything here? Is there any other way to register duration of the task vs how many hours of work per resource assigned to the task?

    Thank you all for taking the time to read this,

    Jose Brey

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    Thanks for your thoughts. You are correct that Intervals does not include duration in the way traditional project management handles it. When I used to use MS Project heavily I would set up tasks as fixed work and used effort driven scheduling. Say for example you have a task with 40 hours of work that has one person assigned to it. The duration will be five days if the person has 8 hours of availability and nothing else assigned to them. If you add a second person to this task, the duration will be shorter than five days since MS Project assumes that more people working on it will cause the task to get completed quicker. The project schedule would move all over the place depending on availability, vacations, etc.

    Intervals is trying to solve the problem of tracking time, bouncing around different projects, and reporting on each small piece of time. Intervals is geared toward task and time tracking and is light on some traditional project management features for simplicity and for allowing different methodologies to work. The start and end dates are scheduling guidelines to communicate when a task should start and when it should be finished, but the duration or amount of days it takes to complete a task are not impacted by the number of people assigned to a task.

    Regarding how much work is assigned to someone, there is a discussion about resource allocation here if you are interested.

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    Michael,

    Thank you for your response. In the end we've decided to do the math ourselves before creating the task, so if we have a 1 hour meeting with two people involved, the estimated time will be 2 hours. This is not ideal as it looks somehow unnatural, especially if we need to add at some point another party to the meeting, in which case we'd have to change the estimated time to 3 hours when the meeting will run for 1 hour tops.

    As we have no plans to do real project management with the tool this is less of an issue however, we believe is a weak point that restricts its usability. My guess is that your backlog must be as long as my arm however I'd like to suggest this feature as a candidate for future releases. It would make us consider switching some of the projects that are more task intensive onto timetask.

    Thanks for your time,

    Jose Brey

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