How can lunch breaks be accounted for in BigPIcture's workload plan?

[Rob Horan]

For one organization, I need to define a 9 hour workday that includes one hour for lunch - 9am to 6pm, M-F

When I try to do so, BigPicture considers each day to be a 9 hour day.  I want to retain the scheduling but I also need to ensure it's only 8 hours per day.

Is this possible?

[Marcin Geb _SoftwarePlant_]

Hello, I would try the 'Availability' field in BigPicture administration > Teams, as pictured. Eight hours divided by nine is something in the vicinity of 89% ;)

[Rob Horan]

That's not really an ideal solution though, and it assumes that anyone working on this knows to do that.  There should be some way to account for it, without having to resort to a workaround of some sort.

[Marcin Geb _SoftwarePlant_]

Hi Rob,

I agree it's not an ideal solution, and so we've got a feature request https://jira.softwareplant.com/browse/ONE-18373 for what you need.

Could you share if you need that 1-hour intra-day break for presentation purposes or for another reason? The thing is that workload plans in BigPicture are only used to calculate Resources' capacities, so from BP perspective the number of lunch hours is doesn't really matter. All you need to do is to set the number of working hours, 8 hours in your case, be it 9 to 5 or 10 to 6. I'm not an expert on workload plans, but this is what I've learned from our support team.

[Rob Horan]

For my current use case I am thinking about how to configure this for a potential client that may have teams working in different shifts, with different numbers of hours per shift, and keeping this together for an admin who will need to remember how to work around this limitation.

[Mateusz Sołowianiuk]

Hi @Rob Horan,

As mentioned above by Marcin, BigPicture uses the Workload Plans to calculate the resource's working capacity, irrespective of their working hours. While we do have a feature request open for it (linked in Marcin's response), its status is still 'Gathering Interest, ' which means that our Product Management has still not assessed whether it will be developed or not.

When it comes to having multiple shifts with various working hours among them, the administrator will need to create one Workload Plan per shift and then assign it to all their Resources based on their schedule. Unfortunately, this kind of solution will require a great manual effort, but I do not see any other workaround to achieve this at this point in the product development. 

I hope that this clarifies. 

Best regards,

Mateusz Sołowianiuk

SoftwarePlant Support 

[Octopus Investments Ltd]

I've got a similar requirement as well. There should be a way to determine lunch breaks.