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7.2. Effort, allocation, start and finish

In Intellisys, all tasks are effort-driven , that is, given a start date, an effort, and resource allocations, the end date is uniquely determined. The effort, allocation, and start and end dates are, therefore, always interdependent. This can cause some unintuitive things to happen while working with the program. For example, consider a task that starts on Jan 1 at 8:00 am and ends on Jan 1 at 5:00 pm, with an estimated effort of 8 hours, and one resource allocated at 100 percent. Suppose the user changes the end date to be Jan 2 at 5:00 pm, then the effort is inconsistent with the start and end dates. When scheduling occurs, the end date will be set back to Jan 1 at 5:00 pm, because, if a resource is starts on an 8 hour task on Jan 1, 8:00 am, and works at 100 percent allocation, he should be done by Jan 1, 5:00 pm.

In the example above, changing the end date to be Jan 2 at 5:00 pm makes the relationship between start, end effort and allocation inconsistent. There are three ways to correct the inconsistency:

  1. change the end date: This is what the system does by default, when no other choice is specified.

  2. change the effort: For our example, increasing the effort to 16 hrs would make the values consistent.

  3. change the allocation: For our example, reducing the allocation to 50% would make the values consistent.

Changing the effort and allocation is discussed further here.