Deliverable/objective view.
Submitted by Lincoln Phipps
Link to original bug (#146695)
Description
The problem with Planner from a project point of view is that it doesn't allow you to easily see how close you are to your objectives or what the deliverables are. These can be implied e.g. a Milestone can be defined and given a title of "Completed Product" and "Completed Install Manual" but what needed is a nice and easy View of these, though I don't just mean a view of milestones.
What I'm envisaging is that this view would also be the default view and that project managers input the project deliverables and then focus on tasks and resources for each of these deliverables in turn. You would set an association (I'll call it a binding) from 1 or a set of tasks (and thus implicitly the assigned resources) to each deliverable. This would thus allow you to quickly show how many of the project deliverables are actually completed as opposed to how much of the tasks are completed; a subtle but important difference when it comes to actually getting payment from a client for whats delivered (Imagine the message "I'm not paying you to complete tasks but paying you to deliver my manual/program/widget".
A deliverable is not complete until all the tasks its bound to are complete. we would have to work on a heuristic for completion but the most obvious is simply the sum of all the bound tasks (work * completion).
I'm thinking a table view,
|Deliverable | %Compl | Due Date | Work To Go | Bound To | Resources | +------------+--------+----------+------------+-------------+------------+ | Widget 1 | 15% | 1 October| 15 Days | 1.6.5, 2.5 | RH, LP, ACS|
With hotspots on the WBS and the Shortname.
etc etc etc.