Frequently Asked Questions Frequently Asked Questions
Q:
I don't understand Real Time v. Work Time. Why can't I just fill in real time durations for all my tasks?
A:
Work Time vs. Duration is commonly misunderstood. Work Time reports the total amount of work that will be performed by all assigned resources. Duration (much farther to the right in the spreadsheet) reports the actual real time it will take to perform a task. A task's Duration is the amount of real time that passes from the moment that work starts until the instance it ends. It is the real time analog to the person time or man day value in the Work Time cell.
Using an example, let's say Resource A has Work Time 10 days on a task that starts on a Monday. The (real time) Duration of the task is 12 days (because a weekend is spanned.) If you then assign Resource B to the task, the Work Time will show 20 days, the total work time for both resources. The Duration of the task is still 12 days--it has not become a longer task.
The Work Time number may seem large. For example, if five resources are assigned to a task for one week, its Work Time cell will read something like 25d or 5w. It will take one week to perform the task (as its Duration cell reports), but five weeks of work are accomplished in that time.
You cannot directly set the Work Time of a task with assignments. You must work with their resource assignments. However, the Work Time of a task with assignments can be affected via its Gantt bar. Work Time is not shown directly on Gantt charts, but its most visible side effect, the real time Duration, is. You can set a task's Work Time by resizing its Duration bar (dragging the work end symbol) with the mouse.
Some tasks are perfectly divisible. They can be accomplished by two people in half the time it takes one, by three people in one third the time. Some tasks are not at all divisible, and take a fixed amount of time no matter how many people work on them. Most lie somewhere in between. Perhaps you will get a job done faster by throwing more people at it, but how much faster? And how many more workers can the task actually support?
TaskMaster cannot pretend to know the answers to these questions. In most cases it would be wrong if it assumed perfect divisibility. Instead, TaskMaster follows the convention among project management software by assuming that tasks are indivisible.
Unfortunately, the version of TaskMaster that you are using only lets you change task duration by tweaking all resource assignments. We hope to make the next version more flexible so you can drag a task's bar on the Gantt chart to change its real-time duration, and as a side effect reset the work time of all assigned resources.
It has been suggested that we could extend our model to reflect divisibility of tasks, experience of resources, and how the one effects the other. We feel this would add complexity and confusion, and buy little for most of our users.
Valid for 1.5
Valid for 1.6
Valid for 1.7
