Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Overbooked Tasks and Overallocated Resources



My hats off to the engineering folks at TeamDirection for rethinking and reimplementing the 'Show Overbooked' filter in IntelliGantt. Very slick!

With my remaining hats, I doff them to our customers that took the time to give their feedback and help improve the product for everyone. Let's just say folks had a few ideas on how to better this feature.

The result plays very well with IntelliGantt's improved multi-project viewing architecture. In fact, touching on a the 'Sum is greater than the Parts' theme, it's really two different systems playing very well together-- Multi-Project View and Task Filtering. Each can be used by itself, but together these two systems solve two rather severe limitations the old product had in identifying overbooked tasks and overallocated resources:

1) In V3 only projects within a single folder could have the filter applied
2) In V3 the filter only went to 'day' granularity. That is, if a task was less than 1 day or a resource was less than 100% utilized... well... version 4 is here!

With IntelliGantt V4 you can select any combination of projects you want, which should be very helpful when verifying that all the places you put your 'best woman for the job' are still in the same space-time continuim.

And of course, since IntelliGantt 4 supports 'level of effort' per assignment, the filter also does a bit a match and recognizes that less than a day is ok.

Click on the image for the screencast and, if you really want to see IntelliGantt 4 in action, use this link to try it out yourself.

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