| Project Progress Indication is Misleading, in Support |
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rslinct
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 Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 8:03 pm Post subject: Project Progress Indication is Misleading |
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I have read the posts regarding project times/status etc but they seem a bit different than this post.
I have a project with 4 tasks, all with dependencies one after the other, A then B then C and lastly D.
Task A is allocated 1 hours of effort.
Task B is allocated 1 hour of effort.
Task C is allocated 1 hour of effort.
Task D is allocated 97 hours of effort.
With 0% complete on each task, the Project Progress shows 0%.
Now after 1 day of work:
Task A 100% complete
Task B 100% complete
Task C 100% complete
Task D 0% complete
The overall Project Progress shows 75%.
As a manager, this would cause a lot of issues because the weight of the tasks is not taken into consideration.
The project appears that it is almost ready to ship and should be in the final stages.
Estimated hours should be taken into consideration for weighting of each task and in my example case, the total estimate for a job is 100 hours and only 3 of those are 100% complete.
It should be shown as 3% complete in the Project Progress, not 75%.
Is this a modification that can be made in the source code that I would receive in the "self-hosted" method?
Or is this something that is buried in the flash time line code that is protected and unchangeable by me?
I have about 6 days left on the trial and this is the deciding factor in whether or not I buy the Corporate edition to self-host.
Thank you. |
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Ben
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| Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 1:32 am Post subject: |
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The Project completion % has always been a subjective one, based on the % completion of the tasks.
In real terms it's generally much more effective than the example you outline below. Why would anyone have four tasks with 1 hour, 1 hour, 1 hour, and 97 hours? 
This could be modified if you had a license, but not for the hosted subscriptions. It's not in the Flash code.
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| I have about 6 days left on the trial and this is the deciding factor in whether or not I buy the Corporate edition to self-host. |
I do understand that Copper isn't for everyone but I'm surprised something this small would be a showstopper, maybe try it in practice and you might be surprised. |
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rslinct
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| Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 5:44 am Post subject: |
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Interesting reply from you but I did get my answers.
I like the product but this one issue would clearly cause issues for management folks above me if it couldn't be fixed. Those owners and managers are funny folk and they certainly don't like surprises when it comes to them getting paid from progress payments. 
Whoops, the engineering is not really complete, I only thought it was based on the project progress report. 
What surprised me the most from this post so far is apparently my organization is the only one that finds this more than a small problem.
Like I said, I like the product for the most part and as long as I could mod it, I am ok with it.
Thanks |
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Ben
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| Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 5:58 am Post subject: |
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| rslinct wrote: |
Interesting reply from you but I did get my answers.
I like the product but this one issue would clearly cause issues for management folks above me if it couldn't be fixed. Those owners and managers are funny folk and they certainly don't like surprises when it comes to them getting paid from progress payments.
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I do understand, and we really do make changes based on popular opinion, this isn't the case in this instance.
The subjective % completion method just hasn't been a problem in the way you describe, if anything in the main it has provided a more humanistic interpretation of where a task and project is, rather than relying on an algorithm.
It could be that most customers don't have the kind of lopsided task efforts you cite in your example, usually a 90+ hour task is broken into subtasks, or all other tasks are relatively similar in effort.
The progress invoicing in Copper isn't based on this % however, it is based on the actual hours logged multiplied by the resource rate.
But yes, under license you could have this change made quite easily, so the option is there if you want to depart from the base functionality.
| rslinct wrote: |
What surprised me the most from this post so far is apparently my organization is the only one that finds this more than a small problem.
Like I said, I like the product for the most part and as long as I could mod it, I am ok with it.
Thanks |
If others want to chime in here it'd definitely give your case more weight as we move forward with the product, but quite often what might seem imperative to one customer really isn't important to another. Our job is to weigh the balance of requirements and progress the product within our development budget without alienating the majority.
More than happy to review it if demand dictates, and it would be great to have you on board! |
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rslinct
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| Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 5:21 pm Post subject: |
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We've beat this to death already and what I now know is, I like the product and I can change it to match my needs.
With that said, I hope to move on this by the end of the day Friday but I am still waiting for my final group assessment.
Our main use of Copper will be to use it as a project tracker and to allow people web access to see where progress is. We won't be invoicing or quoting and most likely not even tracking hours. We are using it for the percentages and project progress only.
Maybe in the future, we will use more functionality of Copper but all we need/want at this time is % progress.
We develop software here and we want to be able to track it and then have higher ups have a web based solution to track and monitor the progress.
As you already know, the ability to have remote developers and people work from anywhere on any platform is important these days.
Hopefully Copper will give me what I want as well as keep the higher ups informed from afar without us having to interpret and explain discrepancies and surprises.
As for time keeping and having numerous tasks for anything over 90 hours, we have people allocated 100's of hours and they have a set task to complete. We don't micro-manage and accost them to fine detail of hourly reporting.
We have a whole separate accounting, payroll, sales, marketing group and others that handle all that stuff.
I have read the few posts on here about a widget or two where the developers could have their hours logged automatically from their desktop. This is when I would consider tracking actual hours.
I used dotProject for a bit and there is a nice widget that my developers logged hours. Problem is, dotPreoject was way to involved for what I wanted.
And this has turned into another thread and an editorial so I will stop here until I buy the product.
Thanks for you support so far. |
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ckuilman
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| Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 28 May 2008
Posts: 4
Location: Toronto, Canada
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| Although we are only a month into using Copper, I'll add my subjective voice to suggest a % completion based on total time would be more accurate. Could there be a way, for those who want this, to select it as an option within admin settings? |
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