automated task leveling
We have budget of time for a task and we have task duration. Dividing budget by duration yields how much effort per unit of time a task requires.
Summing up the effort per day of all the tasks within a day yields how much work has to put someone to do all the tasks.
If that effort goes beyond a certain amount (say, 8 hrs per day), Task Couch should let a user to level it automatically by postponing the tasks that to not have a fixed start date.
This feature requires:
1) tasks with floating start date - required.
2) task inter-dependencies - optional.
This feature is the only one that prevents me from using this otherwise great product.
This is too complex and not easy enough to control, BUT most of what you want is possible already.
There is something like floating start date — there is planned start vs actual start. A task with an actual start is floating in some sense because it didn’t have a plan. A plan-only task that is past date is marked “late”
Thus, it is possible to sort and determine the difference between planned and actually started, planned but late, and unplanned but actually started.
And there is already task prerequisites.
The one thing you still need is a quick calculation of sum for many tasks’ “Budget Left”
You should vote for this request:
http://taskcoach.uservoice.com/forums/26465-desktop-version-windows-linux-mac-of-task-coach/suggestions/606269-section-in-status-bar-for-calculated-information-a
If you haven’t used Task Coach since posting this, consider trying the newest version. It might not be everything you want, but I think you can effectively get what you need…