> I would say that A does not get allocated resources, just AA and AB, and > A's planned start time is the earlier of AA and AB, and planned end the > later, and that's that. > In your example AA will be done in 4 days and > AB 7.5 so that's A's finish time. >
I m not sure about how other PMS handle this, but it seems that distinguishing between simple (atomic) tasks and composite tasks / activities should be considered ... the limit between what's atomic and what's not should be left to the project manager or somebody else in the dev team, enterprise, etc (I mean not to enforce a policy ;) I don't understand what you mean here. With a WBS organization, tasks are either leaves (no children) or not. I am proposing to have a rule that non-leaf tasks only hold leaf tasks and don't have associated work. One can always add a subtask to hold the work. It would be reasonable to make that configurable, but I think it's easier to just have the rule and doesn't hurt much. ... but I am not sure about the conflict ... IMHO (now) it's just about the way scheduling's carried out. WBS is only about tasks, activities (compound) and relationships | constraints (e.g. available resources & allocation, dependencies ...) . OTH, scheduling is about (planning | estimating) the tasks to do at a specific time (date) ... I think there's something like this in the wiki ... isn't it ? Or am I missing something ? In classic earned value, a WBS is a hiararchical description of all tasks, and usually those tasks all have estimated costs. Then there are the start/finish dependencies. Then one can have available resources and construct a plan for what gets done when. With actual cost data, one can compute Cost Performance Factor. So this is all related, but I think one can set up to express a WBS and task estimates, and even compute earned value and CPF with no scheduling. And none of this will make sceheduling harder.
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