Setting if there will be a day (or, more often than not, many days) where there will be no work is important to have a realistic deadline estimation. Forgetting that there will be holidays or not setting the work days correctly may result in mistakes in scheduling - and, as a consequence, delaying the project.
The next sections will show you how to set the default work days correctly and plan exceptions in advance.
Work days
By default, Saturday and Sunday are set as non working days and tasks are only planned on the other days. This means that when you drag a task into a the weekend, it will be automatically extended to cross the weekend.
The screen recording below shows how a task with 6 days of work doesn't end in one week. It is automatically extended over the weekend and finishes on the Monday of the next week instead.
If you want Placker to schedule cards differently, there are a few settings that you can change from the settings panel:
Ignore workday settings and plan on all weekdays
Select which days of the week are workdays
Show and hide working days on the Gantt scale
Where to find the workday settings
The workday settings are set on board level and available in the board plan attributes. You can access the board plan by double-clicking the board title.
Plan on all weekdays
You can ignore the workday settings and plan on all days in the week, to do this disable the setting 'Schedule based on set workdays'. And save your changes to enable them.
Set the workdays
You can set which days of the weeks are work days. By default Saturday and Sunday are non working days but you can change this. For example, when Friday is a non-working day for you and Sunday is, you can change this from the settings pop-up.
Show and hide working days on the Gantt scale
By default non working days are grayed out on the Gantt scale, you can also choose to hide them from the Gantt scale by deselecting 'Show off days on scale' in the Visibility settings.
When you do they will be hidden on the scale, make sure to refresh the Gantt and to to save your changes after you made them in the right way if you want this to become the default settings.
Work hours
By default, the Gantt chart in Placker will highlight the work hours of a day only. By default, the number of work hours is set to 8 hours between 9 AM (9:00) and 5 PM (17:00).
Because we are also planning based on work hours, this also drives the planning process based on estimates. When a card has an estimated effort of 8 hours, it will cover 8 hours on the Gantt timeline by default.
You can also double-click the board title and edit the calendar options to change the following settings to adjust the work hours:
You can disable using work hours, one day in the Gantt chart will then correspond to the full 24 hours in a day.
You can change the number of work hours to any figure between 1 and 23 hours. By default, the number of work hours is set to 8.
You can change the start hour of the day to accurately let it reflect your working day (or time zone).
Please check the following screen recordings that show you how work hours are used and the impact of each of the settings.
Default values
Default values, 8 work hours per day, where the day starts at 9:00 AM. Notice in the screen recording below that when the effort is updated, also the timeline of the card is updated.
Change work hours settings
The work hours are set on the board level and can be changed by viewing the board plan attributes from the filter & settings panel, the screen recording below shows how you can open these settings.
Change work hours per day
By default, there are 8 plannable work hours per day. You can change this to any number between 1 and 23 in the settings panel.
Please note that changing the work hours per day does not update the duration automatically, any updated on the gantt will recalculated the duration/effort based on the new value.
Disable work hours
You can disable the work hours from the settings menu, notice that when you disable using work hours, each hour of the day is counted as a work hour. Thus a full day will be 24 estimated hours.
Change work starting hour
By default the day starts at 9:00 (AM) and ends 8 hours later at 5 PM (17:00), you can change this in the setting panel. When changed, this will be the hour that will be used as the start of day hour, and cards will be planned accordingly.
Setting holidays / non working days
The topics above referred to adjusting the default calendar values, but Placker also supports setting specific non working days (such as holidays, vacations, out of office period) and workdays by week for the board.
To do this, open the board settings, by double-clicking the board title, then in the Calendar section you can select what these dates are. They need to have a start and end date, and also a title.
To copy the workdays from one board to another or more information on the board settings, please check this article: http://help.placker.com/en/articles/5429537-board-settings-in-placker
More information on Gantt charts
If you want to learn other Gantt-related features, check out the Gantt section in our help center or ask us using the chat button.
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