Managing tasks Project Management

235 If you have tasks related to a phase, you can see them in the Tasks Details tab of your phase form. Schedule them by clicking the Schedule Tasks button. All the tasks which are in draft, pending and open state are scheduled and their dates are calculated based on the starting date of the phase. Figure 19.7: Schedule Related Unclosed Tasks You can similarly derive the Gantt charts for Project Phases and Resources Allocation in the following ways: Compute Phase Scheduling Obtain the Gantt chart for Project Phases through the menu Project → Scheduling → Compute Phase Scheduling . A dialog box will appear allowing you to select all projects or a single project. It will compute the start date and end date of the phases which are in draft, open and pending state of the given project. Click Compute to open Gantt view. Figure 19.8: Gantt Chart for Project Phases Compute Tasks Scheduling This feature has the same purpose as the previous one and is used only for projects that are not cut in phases, but only consist of a list of tasks. To access it, go to Project → Scheduling → Compute Task Scheduling. You must and can select only a single project for computation. It shows the Gantt chart for Resources Allocation. 236 Figure 19.9: Gantt Chart for Resources Allocation

19.3 Planning to Improve Leadership

Planning in a company often takes the form of regular meetings between the different teams. Each team has a certain number of projects and objectives that they must organize and establish priorities for. Ideally, these planning meetings should be short but regular and systematic. They can be weekly or monthly depending on the type of activity. A planning meeting often runs in three phases: 1. Minutes of the preceding period, and analysis of the work done compared to the planned work. 2. Introduction of new projects. 3. Planning the next period. The planning function covers several objectives which will be described in this section: • planning live projects against the commitments that have been made to clients, • determining staffing HR requirements in the coming month, • setting work for each employee or team for the periods to come, • analyzing the work done in the preceding periods, • passing the high-level objectives to lower levels in the company’s hierarchy. Tip: The social role of planning Some project managers think that they can manage planning on their own. They are commonly overworked and think that meetings are a waste of time. Even if staff really can manage their work for themselves, you should recognize that this regular meeting is also aimed at reassurance. Without it you can get into unduly stressful situations from: • feelings of overwork because they have lost sight of their priorities, • lack of feedback and tracking of the work actually completed, • an impression of poor organization if that has not been made explicit. So the social role of planning should not be neglected. We have often experienced a background of stress in a company stemming from a lack of communication and planning. 19.3.1 Planning by time or by tasks? There are two major approaches to enterprise planning: planning by task and planning by time. You can manage both with Open ERP. In planning by task, the project manager assigns tasks from the different projects to each employee over a given period. Employees then carry out precisely the work they have been assigned by the project manager. Planning