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Better support for resource balancing / leveling - scheduling based on people's availability

Tommy

June 06, 2014 16:44

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It would be great if Shotgun had more tools for helping to visualize overlap between Tasks assigned to the same Person, and adjusting the schedule so that no one is over-allocated. The current workflow for this is very manual / visual - you just make a Tasks page and group by Assigned To:, and sort by Start or End date. Then you can see how each Person's Task assignments stack up and overlap, and manually adjust them while cross-referencing your production schedule to make sure everything is still finishing on time.

What kind of workflows would be more useful here? What other tools have you used that do this well? This is a tricky one, so we'd love for users to add comments here about how they'd like to see this better supported.

Click 'Me Too!' to vote up this feature, and add any additional thoughts or use cases in the comments.

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4 comments

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  Nephi Sanchez July 26, 2017 17:07 Official comment

  Thanks for the comment Espencer.  You are correct, no comments in 4 years but maybe you pinging this thread will fire it up.  = )

   

  Is this how you handle balancing/scheduling?  Do you have a custom field called 'weight'?  I think a lot of people use the 'bid' field like this, curious to hear if you have any insight into using bid v. weight.

   

  cheers,
  Nephi

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  Edward Spencer July 26, 2017 08:16

  Seems like something like adding 'weight' to the tasks and having artist level determine how much 'weight' they can carry - it's not good enough to just say one task per artist per day... sometimes it's just a simple task that takes half a day, so they can get two done per day.

  But then maybe you're spending more time adjusting 'weights' than you would be if you just manually checked through as you already mentioned...

  Given there's been no replies to this for 4 years I'm gonna guess no-one's come up with any good suggestions ;)

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  Edward Spencer July 27, 2017 01:17

  @Nephi, not currently, just starting to think of smarter ways to process scheduling and resource adjustment. We had a similar idea for using bid time as a measure of difficulty, or 'weight'. Not sure how that would carry over to tasks after we've broken them down though, because some people might be good at, let's say motion tracking, but not so good at object tracking. Or a layout artist might be great at dealing with plates, but have no experience of the full CG workflow. It seems like almost we need to make baseball cards for the artists, showing their relative strengths

  @Tony, what do you mean by task starts and ends becoming time-aware? Also, if you have a resource like a puppet that can't be double-booked, why not mark the puppet as a 'Person' entity, and then assign it to the task... adding in checks to make sure an artist and puppet are both assigned to a task and not double-booked?

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  Edward Spencer July 28, 2017 01:58

  @Nephi Oh I see... actually yeah that's a good point. Not to mention sometimes a downstream task will be completed later in the day (like Layout updating CG assets and then Lighting submitting it to the render farm later on to render overnight) whereas if they are linked with upstream and downstream dependencies, the default is to have it start the next day.

  Also, re; assets. I'm not sure assets in the SG sense are designed to be used as a resource (i.e. something that has finite capacity), they're usually CG assets which obviously you can duplicate into as many shots as you want, so you can't really 'book' is per se, since it's more like for something you're in the process of building. Or, how exactly would you want assets to behave differently? What if you duplicated the HumanUser field and renamed as PuppetsProps (or whatever) and then use it to schedule their time?