Understanding the Effort Driven Task in a Project

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the effort driven tasks. He explains their advantages and how we can use them in our project management.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the five minutes PM podcast. Today I like to talk about scuttling and how the relationship between resource allocation and the duration of a Task is made. So basically we can divide the duration of the tasks into basic groups. The first one is fix a duration. It doesn't matter if you add more resources, the duration of the task will be always the same. Let's suppose you need you dry something outdoors. So it doesn't matter if you put one person provides this Task or two or three, because the drain process relies on this.

And so in this, you have a very, almost no flexibility to change. So this is a fixed duration. There is very few things you can do to speed up this process, but only for Driven scheduling. When you were a sign off, remove people from an, a specific tasks, did duration can be reduced it or increase it based on the number of resources you assigned to it. So it's very, very important to understand that when you use a Fort Driven scaffolding, when you add more resources, the work will be divided by that and the additional resources regardless off their skills.

So it's a very, very important. So lets give you a clear example let's suppose you have any Task that takes 20 hours in initially you will assign with a carpenter to do this test. So we had to be 20 hours of work for that carpenter, but let's suppose that two days later you decided to add a Pater to work together with the carpenter. If you are considering that this Task is a four Driven what will happen? That 20 hours of work on that Task will be splitted 10 hours for the carpenter and 10 hours for the painter.

Okay. So this is how it works. So it doesn't matter. It always think that the resources you have have the same skills. So there is a major risk, of course the business. We know that we are speeding up the Task, but what is the main challenge on that is that when you do something and like that you are assuming that both resources our, with the same level of competence to do the task. So it's very common when you see, for example, after a year disasters and some kind of basic reconstruction, we see that it doesn't matter too much, the skills, it mattered much more than number of people.

And this is a very good point of using a four Driven because it doesn't matter if it's a carpenter, if it's a painter or if it's an engineer, everybody helps to reduce the duration of the Task. So it's always the good and the bad side of doing that. The good it's always you reduce the time, but outside is that you increase the risk by considering that all skills are pretty much the same, you know, doing this on the software is very, very easy.

For example, if you take Microsoft Project you just need to insert the Task field for Driven and then it's yes or no. So this is the easiest part. The toughest part is to understand when he should use this. When does it make sense for your project? And remember all software, they have this feature, but we do not have the brain. You have, you think when it's good and when it's not good to do that, right when it's not good, for example, in Microsoft project or any other software, if you put a 30,000 resources, it will divide the work amongst this 30,000.

And then you can come to an end that you will be built in a wall. They in two seconds, this mathematically is right, but in reality, this is not right. So you, as a project manager, you need to understand when this next sense or not. And this is a very useful tool when I have Task is on my critical path or . And I know that both the critical path or the critical chain were moving just because of the resources.

And then I can make, add some layers of additional resource to speed up even more. If this is a way Task like press part of something. But if this is a technical question, this will drive me to a very high level of risk. So at the end, doing this on the software, is that very, very simple? It's a yes or no flag that you need to activate for the task, but understanding this it's time, a much more complex task that I want. And I need that to think about every time you are doing time management on your project, I hope you enjoyed this podcast.

See you next week with a, not a five minute PM. Podcast.

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Ricardo Vargas

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Understanding the Effort Driven Task in a Project

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