We are a three man programming team with a huge scheduling problem. We need some software to help us manage this problem. We could build this software ourselves but we would rather use somebody else's brilliant solution.
Does anyone out there know of one???
Here's the problem. Let's start with a clean slate.
A programmer in the company is given a new job to do. Say its 5 days work. We tell the client its 8 days work as we will be interrupted and know the real production time is going to be longer than 5 days.
1 day into the job the programmer is interrupted with a critical bug that needs to be fixed on another project. The ideal system would allow us to insert this task into his schedule. It would then warn us that this task is conflicting with the original task and ask us to set a priority. We would prioritize the bug over the job and all would be well as the original job still has 2 days slack. The programmer would know the bug is more critical. And the system would tell us that the original job can still get done.
Then perhaps another more critical task would interrupt that bug. And other tasks would appear. Eventually, the slack in the original project would be lost and the system would need to indicate that projects or bugs wont get done on time.
Multiply these tasks across three programmers and multiple jobs and it is pretty easy to reach complete uncertainty about the delivery of anything!
That's the problem we face.
Standard project management software like Microsoft Project does not solve these problems. It requires the manual insertion of tasks and the manual creation of dependencies. We have tried to use it and found 1 -2 hours a day wasted in scheduling without any real clarity about what was going on. I eventually decided that was because project managing and task scheduling are fundamentally different.
I have a pretty clear picture of the software I have in mind.
Surely it exists?
Does anyone know of a solution.
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