Question

FogBugz gets a lot of stuff right:

• It doesn't just accept my estimate. It looks at my history and gives me dates based on what I've done - not what I say.
• It doesn't just accept the team's estimate for the hours in the burn down chart. It ingeniously brings probability into the mix there as well.

So why does it just accept my estimate for how much time I'm going to spend on a project? This just completely undoes all of the good stuff.

I guess there are some people that work exactly the listed percentages on each project but I've never seen that. I can't tell if a task is really going to take 2 hours, I certainly can't tell if I'm going to be working on projectx for 90% or 80% of my time this week - I can estimate, but I can't know.

There has to be a way for FB to look at my past and figure out the following:

• How much time am I actually spending on projectx vs my estimated allocation?
• How much time will I probably spend on projectx in the future vs my estimated allocation?

I think FB should never accept our estimates as-is.

To take this one step further, actual vs estimated time should be shown somewhere. Possibly in an existing report or in a new report. This is really important for project managers who need to understand what's happening on a project. It also helps people adjust when they're not working at the right allocations. They can either switch gears to focus on a different project, or work with their managers to change their allocations.

Also, it seems like this would tie in very naturally to how all of the other reports are working.

Case FC1303047

Answer 1

Agreed. Love it. I have attached this to a standing feature request for showing how well your stated per-project percent time matches up with your actual; I agree that the graph showing both would be very nice for figuring out where you went wrong, although I suppose there would need to be some smoothing so that the data isn't too jagged to read. We'll have to look at it with real data.

We will probably keep this out of the actual EBS simulations for now because it seems like it might complicate the mental model of those too much, but I think you're absolutely right, we should make it easy for users to figure out if their actual % matches their stated.

Answer 2

A button to 'calculate my working schedule based on my previous work' might be easier to understand than trying to factor this in automatically. It'd change the % allocations at that instant (according to some clever calculation giving more weight to the last week than to the last year), but the figures would still be editable.

This would feed into a better understanding of actual time allocation, without taking away the ability to plan an intended working schedule for each team member going forwards.

Answer 3

My understanding of the purpose of the %time allocation is so that the scheduling mechanism sets aside specific chunks of time when it determines the probabilities of accomplishing tasks by certain dates. Other than blocking out access to chunks of time by a project, or blocking a project into a smaller chunk of time, you are basically putting constraints on how the scheduling will estimate when things will get done. It isn't any different from the way the "work schedule" impacts things other than being tied to a specific project, and taking a percentage of the total available time (as dictated by the work schedule