When planning tasks, the Duration is essentially the time between the start date (when an artist can start working on a task) and the end date (when the task is approved and downstream tasks can start).
Of course, over the course of that Duration, let’s say 10 days, the artist will do their work (let’s say 5 days of work), then it will go for review, which may take 2 days, then the artist will do their fixes, let’s say 1 day, then it will go for review and get approved, let’s say 2 says. So during the 10 day duration, the artist is actually working 6 days on that task, and is free to work on another task for the other 4 days during that time.
I know that SG has the Workload calculated field for Resource Planning which can calculate the actual work time for the artist. Is the Workload field (or anything similar) used in Generative Scheduling to account for the fact that an artist may only work on a task for a fraction of the Duration?
It could be, the workload could literally be the bid. Workload is used in the SG Resource Planning app, so I’m hoping it’s also used in Generative Scheduling.
For us, the bid is the estimate to do the task and get it out for first review, and the workload may be this formula:
where fix-multiplier is the average percentage of the original task it would take to do an average fix. So if the bid is 5 days, an average fix might be 20% of that, or 1 day.
Hi @stavernia - currently the integration between Generative Scheduling and Flow Production Tracking always pulls only the value of Duration (duration) to inform the Task duration on the Generative Scheduling side.
If you’re authoring your own schedule using open schedule format, it is possible to specify fractional resource requirements, which could be an option for someone creating their own integration. For example, if it’s typical for Lighters in your studio to double up on shots, then you could say that a Lighting task has a resource requirement of 0.5 Lighters.
However, I do think it could be interesting to look at mixing these concepts and having the Workload tie in with the resource requirement aspect, e.g. if a Lighting Task in FPTR has a duration of 10 days and a Workload of 5 days then perhaps when you pull it into Generative Scheduling it should go ahead and set the resource requirement to be 0.5 units of Lighting. Do you think something like that would make sense?
Yeah absolutely, that would be helpful! Generative Scheduling could then correctly calculate the work required AND the time it would take to complete it. The length of the task would still be dependent on duration, but the amount of artists needed would be dependent on workload.
The default for SG is workload = duration, so Generative Scheduling would work exactly the same if no action is taken to update the workload field.
I’ll look into creating my own OSF json, that should be pretty straightforward, but it sure would be great to get this functionality natively, which would align with Resource Planning as well. That would also make it very easy for users to iteratively create new playgrounds without leaving the app to create a new OSF json.
