the hardest part to deal with in these programs is the work day. they
usually assume an 8 hour day. with sophisticated programs you can tailor
the costs (overtime rates, holidays, etc) and schedule to the labour union
contracts. but then you plan for everyone working a 40 hour week and they
end up working 60 hour weeks. throws the plan off.

for a one person project its better just to calculate the total amount of
hours and forget the scheduling part of the program. I got MS Project to
do it by using hours as the time unit and setting the work day to 24
hours. the program is designed to display a wall calendar with the tasks
on it, and a bar chart of the tasks laid over a date grid which is almost
the same thing. I couldn't get them to display properly with my time
units. maybe if I spent more time trying things. there are actually very
simple "shareware" programs written by students and amateur computer
programmers which are better for one-man projects. they even run on old DOS
computers without colour graphics.

Its the exercise of dividing the work up into separate tasks, estimating
how long they should take, and figuring out what order they have to be
done in that helps the most. that's why I only put screen shots of the
task list and paths (critical path diagram) on my website. that
information would be helpful included in boat plans people sell. The part
about assigning people to each task and laying the project out on a
calendar aren't very relevant for the amateur boatbuilder. Planners do
that on big boatbulding projects like submarines and cruise liners. They
update the data as the project progresses and compare the work to the
plan. That saves them a lot of time and money.


Jim Conlin ) writes:
I find that i'm messed up not by the interrelation between tasks, nor by
working around long-lead procurement, but by what project analysts call
'resource ;loading', meaning that all the tasks depend on one resource, ME. In
truth, all the tasks with ME in 'em could be critical path if i don't get to
'em.
I don't need PM tools, just more competent help.

"The Mythical Man Month" described how, on the IBM OS/360 opertating system
project in the 1960's, adding more people made the project take longer and
cost more.


Glenn Ashmore wrote:

William R. Watt wrote:
I loaded a copy of MS Project onto my computer, input some tasks for a
small boatbuilding project, captured some screen images, and put them in
files on my website as an illustration of what a project managment program
does. The files show the list of tasks and the critical path network
diagram as they would appear on the screen. If anyone would like to take a
look go to my website (address below) and click on Boats, Boatbuilding,
Project Planning.

I did the same thing before starting Rutu. Scared the hell out of me.
Fortunately, the schedule part had little to do with reality but the
critical path analysis has helped keep me on track.

--
Glenn Ashmore

I'm building a 45' cutter in strip/composite. Watch my progress (or lack
there of) at: http://www.rutuonline.com
Shameless Commercial Division: http://www.spade-anchor-us.com



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