MicrosoftIs there any other threads on the issue of the bug around ‘effort calculation’?
I'm not aware of any bugs as such, but it can be difficult to follow exactly why a calculation does what it does. An example would help of what you consider this 'bug' is dancas
Hey Brian,
It may be a mix of peculiar formulas to determine the % and a glitch in the matrix. I have a team of 15 PMs and we moved from Planisware to Planner Prem, cost savings plus simplified being part of the O365 infrastructure.
So now that we are on Planner Prem, there were dozens of instances where the card goes to 100% even with the due date months in the future. It has seemed to improve as of early this month, but when we transitioned if you moved the percentage forward it would jump to 100% even if the due date was 6 months in the future and your task list was only halfway completed. In the attached instance, we had to change the % complete to 73% to get it past 50% but not 100%.
If you change Duration for a task that is partially complete the Effort Remaining also updates, but not vice versa. Changing the Duration should not update Effort and changing Effort should not update Duration, the two should be independent. So the current behavior is inconsistent and just half right.
There are also weird automatic updates, for example:
Furthermore, the default effort is also calculated for a task based on a fixed 8 hours/day which is almost universally unrealistic. You should either be able to set the benchmark hours/day based on assignee or project, or just avoid calculating a spurious value and leave the effort to be set manually.
Right now our organisation has given up entirely trying to use the Effort fields, since the behaviour is so unpredictable and unrealistic.
Hi OwenJones - The scheduling engine is the exact one used in the Microsoft Project desktop application that has been around for very many years. I can see why you might think step 3 is illogical, but it is due to the % Complete being % duration complete, for the fixed duration task - so the 5h completed work is half of the first week - even though the % work complete would be expected to be 50%, the completed duration is not.
This same calculation in the desktop app after changing duration to 2 weeks, and then changing % complete to 50%:
You might want to used different task modes to see which behavior feels most logical. Planner was made to be simple, but one challenge is some of the complexity of different task modes and work/duration differences are hidden away and there aren't the same views to understand just what is heppening. I hope the explanation helps, but can certainly understand why it looks 'wrong'.
Edit: adding the numbers behind that final calculation - visible through the Task Usage view in Project desktop - not a view that is available in Planner:
