What if analysis for project management

Steve de Peijper

Background

Are you a project manager? Do you question what would happen when..

A resource would spend more or less time on projects, considering;

  • The project priorities for each resource
  • The ratio of time spent for projects with equal priority
  • The productivity for resources for specific projects
  • Fixed projects that require hours spent regardless of the paramaters

How does it work..

The shiny application I built will render a new gantt chart whenever one of the tuning parameters changes. The tuning parameter is the amount of hours a resource can spend on projects.

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Calculation

The shiny application will consider the settings that have been provided via an excelsheet:

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Prio: this sets the prio per person per project

Fixed: this means the hours will be used regardless of the parameters

Hours: related to fixed projects

Percentage: ratio for projects with equal prio

Efficiency: increase of decrease of hours based on percentage.

Code used

On a very basic level, this is the code run: All the code is on: https://github.com/stevedep/WhatIf 

weeks = c(1:10)
duration = c(80)
hours = c(32)
allocation <<- data.frame("Week" = numeric(0), "Hours" = numeric(0))
for(w in 1:length(weeks)) 
{
  if (duration > 0) {
  allocation[w,2] = hours; allocation[w,1] = w;
  duration = duration - hours
  } else 
    allocation[w,2] = 0; allocation[w,1] = w; 
}
allocation

   Week Hours
1     1    32
2     2    32
3     3    32
4     4     0
5     5     0
6     6     0
7     7     0
8     8     0
9     9     0
10   10     0