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Project Management Conundrum: Percent Assignment
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Date: 21 September, 2006 - 02:35

We all understand what it means when someone is 100% allocated: their entire working time is assigned to some set of tasks. If they're 50% allocated, they have half of their time assigned. It's all pretty straightforward and we all know what it means... but what about from the Project's perspective?

What does percent assignment mean?

Let's say I have a task estimated to take 10 hours and a pair of people to work on it. If I assign 50% to each, then they should each perform 5 hours of the task and they should be done in a single day. Or did I mean something else? Did the 50% actually mean that each of them should spend 50% of their time on it until the task is complete. In this case, sometime on the second day.

Within dotProject, this question comes up quite often. Since Resource Management (aka "people's time") is still on the drawing board for v3.0, there hasn't been a definitive answer and we've taken the position of "it means what you want" and then we whistle quietly and sneak away while you're not looking. Obviously this isn't a longterm solution, so I put it to you:

What does percent assignment mean to you?


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people's time

Submitted by Nick_lar (not verified) on 2 October, 2006 - 09:56.

the percentage of user's time refer imho to their actual working time. Let's assume a working day of 8h per user. If I assign a user to a task with 50% this means I assign 4h of the day of the user to the task (50% of their working day).
If a project is estimated with 10h and I assign 2 users (each with 8h-days) with 50% this means both are working 4h per day on this project (adding to 8h in total), resulting in completion of the project on the second day after additional one hour per user (8+2=10).

I always considered the percentage of the users time directly referring to the hours worked per day and not as a percentage of time spent for a specific project.

If you consider 50% of the project per user these numbers - 50% - change meaning with every project. For a 10h project 50% would be 5h and for a 20h project it would be 10h. Unless you have different working hours for different users 50% in my context would always mean 4h. Easy to calculate now how many users you need to meet a dedadline for a project (if you know the required manpower down to the hour and do not consider scaling effects ;-))

For dotProject 3.0 this would be on my wishlist: automatic calculation of the project duration according to the number of the assigned users and their percentage of daily work spent on the project.

re: people's time

Submitted by Gaetano Giunta (not verified) on 3 October, 2006 - 09:10.

A very interesting topic, and people migth have different opinions on this.

As far as I am concerned, I have a lot of low-priority tasks routinely carried out. Such a task might involve e.g. 4hrs of work, but since it is low priority it could be logged in the system now, with an ending date of next week (start date being either now or null).
It is then up to the developer to decide when to do the job, count the time he has spent on it and log the end of the task.
Following this line of reasoning, assigning 50% of the task fits better the '50% of total 4hrs' model.

The percent of the total working 8rs/day allocated per person then has to be calculated with a slightly more complex formula (esp. if a 2 hours work task can be carried out freely within a week: this simply prevents to show precisely daily overallocation, allowing only weekly totals, but the situation could be worse, with montly/yearly totals, etc...)

for low priority tasks on a

Submitted by Nick_lar (not verified) on 4 October, 2006 - 05:09.

for low priority tasks on a daily basis, where it is difficult to calculate the amounts of hours spent per day, it would be a solution to work just by start and end date.
If it is necessary to see the according percentage of the users working time per day than this could be reverse calculated by the total estimated amount of work for the user and the prognosed duration of the project.
But I think this leads to a sophisticated resource management with automatic resource calculation etc. like in M$Project - and this is still a long way to go for dotProject.

And how about routine tasks without a start/end date? This can only be solved imho by not completely using up everey daily working hour for planing. We calculate with max 40%-50% of the capacity of the user. This leaves the rest to routine tasks and daily buisiness like incoming phone calls, unplanned actual things etc. So in result of a 8h working day we use only 4h for planning and if a user is assigned 50% to a task this means real 2h per day working on the project.

Any attempt to plan for more than 50% of the daily working hours proved to be too ambitious and caused in the end only dissatisfaction and unreal expectations.

just my 2 cent

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