We’re working on the second development phase for AceProject 4.7. There will be three phases in AceProject’s 4.7’s development cycle.

In phase 1, we modified task dependencies.

In phase 2, we tackle how user workload is managed in AceProject. We found that the User Workload report was hard to read. It was difficult to assign several people to do the same task, and yet count their assigned hours efficiently. Here’s what we did:

A typical work day

In AceProject 4.7, you’ll be able to set a typical workday length, in hours. This is useful to avoid setting the same work day length for all your users.

Once you’ve set a default for the account, you’ll be able to enable that feature for your users. Moreover, you’ll be able to set different work days for users that don’t follow the main schedule. For example, if someone on your team only works half-days, you’ll be able to set it up accordingly.

Divide the effort amongst your assigned users…or not

Currently, AceProject only permits dividing the effort amongst assigned users in the user workload report. With AceProject 4.7, you’ll be able to choose if the estimated hours in a task should be divided between the assigned (so a 20-hour task assigned to 2 persons means 10 hours of work each), or not (so a 20-hour task assigned to 2 persons means 20 hours of work each).

Better project estimates

With this feature in place, the total effort for a project will be estimated more accurately. AceProject will take into account whether a task’s work is divided amongst assigned users or not, and compute the total project work to be done accordingly.

A workload report you can use

The current user workload report is hard to read. It’s a list of numbers, and nothing stands out. Hence it’s hard to identify who has too much work assigned. With the typical work day feature, AceProject 4.7 will compare the work assigned to each person daily, and highlight the days where your team members are over-allocated.

Coming soon!

AceProject 4.7 is scheduled to release at the end of spring / beginning of summer.