Timing Plans Single Dialogs Workspace
Use this workspace to view all relevant deadlines for tasks, for both internal and external reporting.
The Timing Plans tab displays the information that is relevant for the Traffic Manager. The Job Budget Lines sub-tab displays lines from the latest revision of the job's planning budget.
This workspace is part of Maconomy Traffic Management.
The actual planning of job traffic takes place in this workspace and the Job Traffic Status workspace. For example, the timing plan forms the basis for the traffic reports that are used in job status meetings.
Each timing plan line corresponds to a task in the job's timing plan. You adjust the timing of the tasks by using the planned starting and ending dates on the individual lines. You can adjust them manually by changing the date fields or automatically by defining a suggested duration and delay on each line. Use the Calculate Dates action to compute all of the dates using the suggested durations and delays on the lines. Dates are calculated from the starting date on the first line and subsequent durations on lines in line order from the top. Thus it is important to put the plans on lines in the correct order.
If you selected a week calendar in the Standard Week Calendar job parameter attribute of the type Planning, the date calculation adjusts for weekends and holidays as defined in the week calendar. Otherwise, calendar days are used. The following table shows how Maconomy fills in dates. Note that you can also inject delays between tasks (see the Delay field in the Job Budget Lines sub-tab), but no delays are included in this example. Note that in the example below, June 7 is a Tuesday.
| Description | Planned Start | Planned End | Duration |
|
Creative Brief |
YYYY.06.07 |
2 |
|
|
Brief, First Creative Internal |
2 |
||
|
First Team Internal |
1 |
||
|
First Creative Internal |
1 |
||
|
Final Team Internal |
1 |
After you use the Calculate Dates action, the timing plan looks like the following.
| Description | Planned Start | Planned End | Duration |
|
Creative Brief |
YYYY.06.07 |
2005.06.08 |
2 |
|
Brief, First Creative Internal |
YYYY.06.09 |
2005.06.10 |
2 |
|
First Team Internal |
YYYY.06.13 |
2005.06.13 |
1 |
|
First Creative Internal |
YYYY.06.14 |
2005.06.14 |
1 |
|
Final Team Internal |
YYYY.06.15 |
2005.06.15 |
1 |
The week calendar in this workspace uses Monday-Friday as working days and skips weekends when calculating the deadlines for a job.
You can assign up to six teams to the job and to the planning lines in this workspace. Teams are groups of employees who work together on a task or the whole job. The division into teams is used for reporting purposes, such as in the Traffic Status Report workspace. In addition, you can only assign an employee to the job budget line in other workspaces if the employee is member of a team selected for the budget line. The teams identified in the Traffic island in the Timing Plans tab are transferred to the corresponding fields in the timing plan lines if the Derive Teams field is selected on the individual lines.
You can designate some lines as milestones. A milestone is characterized by not having any duration—the starting date and the ending date are the same. Milestones are used for traffic reporting purposes and should not be confused with the milestones in the Invoicing Plans workspace.
In addition, the timing plan uses primary dates, which are the most important dates in the timing plan, assembled into a catalog. These might be dates that occur on all timing plans in the organization and should always be available when reporting across jobs, using the Traffic Status Report in the Portal. Primary dates can be milestones that have no duration or tasks associated with work that has to be done. In the latter case, the planned ending date of the task counts as the primary date. You can define up to ten primary dates in the Popup Fields workspace in the Set-Up module.
Because timing plan lines are actually job budget lines, you cannot change them if the budget is approved. If the budget is approved, you can reopen it in this workspace by using the Reopen Budget action.
As in the Job Budgets workspace, this workspace has actions for submitting, approving, reopening, and creating revisions of job budgets. Any changes that you make to the status of a planning budget or to the budget lines in the Job Budget Lines sub-tab of this workspace are also shown in the Job Budgets workspace.
You can print the timing plan for a range of jobs using the Timing Plan layout.