Extending task finish date impact to ETC on assignments

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

When you push out a task Finish Date, what should you expect to happen to the ETC hours on the task assignments?

Environment

Release: All Supported
Component: Clarity Project Management

Resolution

Effort tasks

On Effort tasks, the total ETC hours on each assignment may increase. The amount that the ETC hours increase by depends on the 'Default Allocation %' for that resource on the Team tab. If the ‘Default Allocation %’ is 0 %, then the ETC amount will remain the same for that assignment. The ETC hours will remain distributed based on the team member’s allocation segments.

All Other tasks

For all other tasks, the total ETC hours on each assignment will remain the same. However, the ETC hours will automatically redistribute uniformly across the new task duration. This will occur regardless of the assignment Loading Pattern.

In addition, once timesheets post and the Actual Thru Date gets set or updates, the remaining ETC will redistribute evenly across the remaining periods. The only way to keep ETC in their desired periods is to use Fixed Loading Pattern on the assignments. However, with this option, all unused ETC for periods prior to Actual Thru Date is dropped and not carried forward as in other Loading Patterns. If you are using Earned Value metrics, this may not be an optimal choice as your Work Scheduled metrics will change if ETC is dropped.

Assignment of resources computes the ETC at that time based on the task duration, the resource's default allocation percentage, and the resource's availability. We don't increase or decrease the ETC when the dates change for existing assignments. 

When dates change, the ETC amounts remain the same and are spread across the new duration.

When viewing by % Availability or by FTE - the amount goes down with more availability to complete the work or goes up with less availability to complete the work.  

Example:

• When you 'assign' a resource to a task the ETC is computed based on the duration of the task.
  • ETC 40 hrs / 5 days = 100% availability = 1 FTE
• Now extend the date by 1 more week and for existing, assigned resources you get 
  • ETC 40 hrs / 10 days = 50% availability = 0.50 FTE
• If you add a new resource assignment after changing the date, assuming the resource is 100% allocated and 100% available, it computes the ETC = 80 hrs, 100% of availability, 1 FTE