Hello KDE folks

I'm taking a Project Management course right now and thought I'd give KPlato a try. (in parallel with MSProject). So, bear with me if I start asking dumb questions. I'm new to the software and project management.

Anyway, I just noticed that although I set the base calendar to Sunday = NW, tasks that run through the weekend have an unaltered duration. eg. a 6 day task started on Saturday is completed by the end of Thursday. Whereas MSProject assigns 7 calendar days to the task, ending on Friday:

Sat. = 1 day
Sun. = NW
Mon. = 2 days
Tue. = 3 days
Wed. = 4 days
Thu. = 5 days
Fri. = 6 days

The task has been assigned to a resource (person) and that person's calendar has been set to the base calendar. Estimate Type = Duration.

Am I missing a critical set-up step or is this a bug?

I should also say that it looks like a great application. Pretty-much intuitive to use. Good show.

Frank

fpouw wrote:Hello KDE folks

I'm taking a Project Management course right now and thought I'd give KPlato a try. (in parallel with MSProject). So, bear with me if I start asking dumb questions. I'm new to the software and project management.

Anyway, I just noticed that although I set the base calendar to Sunday = NW, tasks that run through the weekend have an unaltered duration. eg. a 6 day task started on Saturday is completed by the end of Thursday. Whereas MSProject assigns 7 calendar days to the task, ending on Friday:

Sat. = 1 day
Sun. = NW
Mon. = 2 days
Tue. = 3 days
Wed. = 4 days
Thu. = 5 days
Fri. = 6 days

The task has been assigned to a resource (person) and that person's calendar has been set to the base calendar. Estimate Type = Duration.

If you want your duration estimate to refere to work time your task needs to have a calendar assigned which you set in the Calendar column in the Task editor.
Assigning a resource have no effect on Duration tasks.

fpouw wrote:Am I missing a critical set-up step or is this a bug?

Should be just to set the calendar. Found (and fixed) a different bug though: Setting calendar to None is not possible.

fpouw wrote:I should also say that it looks like a great application. Pretty-much intuitive to use. Good show.

Thanks.

Ah! that's done it. Thanks.

But now I'm a bit confused about the assignment of a calendar to a resource. If the person's calendar is set so they don't work on Sunday, shouldn't that prevent KPlato from assigning them work on Sunday?

fpouw wrote:Ah! that's done it. Thanks.

But now I'm a bit confused about the assignment of a calendar to a resource. If the person's calendar is set so they don't work on Sunday, shouldn't that prevent KPlato from assigning them work on Sunday?

I hope it hasn't assigned work to it on sunday, you can check this in the Resource Assignemnts view.
Note that there are three ways to specify an estimate:
Duration wo calendar), Duration w calendar and Effort.
The two first you have tried, the duration is not dependent on the assigned resources in these cases. The last, I beleive is the one you expected to get. When using this, the estimate you specify should be the amount of effort you expect to need to complete the task. The resulting task duration will depend on the how much effort the assigned resource(s) can put into the task.

Ah! That's the ticket. Thanks for your assistance. I'm learning.