In addition to assigning resources on tasks, performing bookings on them is an important part of the planning for a project. When you have the bookings in People Planner, you can then use them to get an estimate of how many hours remain before the project is completed.
To import the Estimated Time to Complete (ETC), you must first enter a date, the Estimate Date. The import of ETCs then returns the total of the bookings in People Planner from this date until the finish date of the project. This value is interpreted to be the estimated remaining time on the project.
This generally makes sense if the Project Manager has in fact booked the resources for the remaining period of the project. This is not necessarily the case for very long projects where the Project Manager might plan for, say, the next half-year into the future, but not all the way to the end of the project.
To update the ETCs:
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Under the Jobs menu section, go to
.
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Click
New Progress Evaluation.
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In the dialog that opens, enter a date in the
Estimate Date field.
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Click
New Progress Evaluation.
By entering a new date in the
Estimate Date
field and clicking the
New Progress Evaluation button, you can repeat this as often as you need.
When People Planner is asked to return the ETCs, it does this based on the estimate date. It sums all of the bookings on and after this date and returns them to Maconomy as the ETCs.
Maconomy updates its ETC column and then calculates the Current Estimate column as the sum of the Actual and ETC columns. It finally writes this sum to the Estimate column; that is, the budget is updated with the new estimated budget from the imported ETCs.
For example, if you set the estimation date is January 16; and already have 200 hours resgistered on timesheets. The Workshops budget line shows this is the actuals. The 550 hours that are planned after the estimate date are added to the actuals. The resulting total—750 hours—is the estimated total number of hours on Workshops.