More Granular Change and Project Planning

The Planned duration and Planned effort fields used to provide the ability to enter a number of hours. But since resource planning is becoming more important in many organizations, more precise planning is needed.

To facilitate this, Xurrent now allows the planned duration and planned effort to be specified in hours and minutes. This will also help with automated task, as their planned duration can now be set to 0:01.

The only thing that change and project managers will notice is that the values they previously entered in these fields are now appended with :00 to the right of the number of hours.

This enhancement affects the Import/Export functionality of Xurrent. An export that includes ‘Planned Duration’ and ‘Planned Effort’ columns now also includes ‘Planned Duration in Minutes’ and ‘Planned Effort in Minutes’ columns. When importing data, either the old columns or the new columns with the names that end with ‘in Minutes’ can be used to set or update the Planned effort and Planned duration fields. It is best not to use both. When both are used, the values in the new columns, which names end with ‘in Minutes’ are used.

The Xurrent REST API is also affected. Here the old planned_duration and planned_effort fields are still returned in an API response, but the new planned_duration_in_minutes and planned_effort_in_minutes fields are now also included. Here also, both the old fields and the new ones ending in ‘in_minutes‘ can be used for setting or updating the Planned duration and Planned effort fields.

Rounding

Because it is now possible to enter a more precise value, the number of hours that is returned for the old Planned effort and Planned duration fields when the Export functionality or the REST API is used is a rounded value. The minimum value in the old fields is still 1 hour, though. So when a value of 0:01 or 0:29 was entered in a Planned effort field, the value that is returned in the ‘Planned Effort’ column of an export file or for the planned_effort field in a REST API response is 1. A value of 1:01 or 1:29 also returns 1. A value of 1:30 or 1:59 gets rounded up to 2.

The complete list of fields of each record type that is affected by this change is provided below:

Task Template

• Planned duration
• Planned effort
• Planned effort change manager
• Planned effort service owner
• Planned effort requester
• Planned effort requester manager
• Planned effort requester business unit manager

Task Template Approval

• Planned effort

Task

• Planned duration
• Planned effort

Task Approval

• Planned effort

Project Task Template

• Planned duration
• Planned effort project manager
• Planned effort service owner
• Planned effort requester
• Planned effort requester manager
• Planned effort requester business unit manager

Project Task Template Assignment

• Planned Effort

Project Task

• Planned duration

Project Task Assignment

• Planned effort

IMPORTANT

The Import/Export functionality and the REST API will stop supporting the planned duration and planned effort in hours on November 30, 2019. At that point, the old fields will behave exactly like the new ‘in_minutes‘ fields, i.e. they will support minutes only. The new ‘in_minutes‘ fields will be deprecated at that moment. These new fields will ultimately be removed on May 30, 2020 to complete this transition.