Project management, resource planning and deadline follow-up with a spreadsheet

Description

Description

The spreadsheet provides:

- a timeline/Gantt chart allowing to follow-up deadlines on multiple time-related resources, with different categories
- the definition of milestones which are relevant for each resource, for each type of resource and for the group the resources are associated to
- a semi-automatic notification by email, based on deadlines and the milestones and person involved directly by the resource, the category and in general, depending on the type of deadline/milestone. The automatic part is based on the mail merge function which integrates with Thunderbird use.
- the follow-up of the distributed allocation of these resources (e.g. projects, services, ...)

Other characteristics and features:

- definition of responsible people (supervisors, managers involved at different levels, ...) which should be notified of the different deadlines

- definition of the status of the resource
- confidentiality-prone. Since data may be sensitive (in the GDPR sense), the spreadsheet's features limit as much as possible the use of personal data (still  possible optionally)

- timeline granularity in the template is a fortnight/half a month. Can be changed with a reasonable effort to other granularities, such as monthly or weekly, up to daily

Application domains

The initial intended main use of the extension is to track personnel contracts of different types, which are linked to different duration, deadlines, milestones (linked to renewals).

With some adaptation, the extension can be used partially (excluding some of the worksheets, which are used roughly as "modules") according to various needs. This could apply to the management and follow-up of material resources (shared or not), project management, planning of activities, releases, etc.

Known issues

- scaling of number of resources (automatic changes in ranges, formulas, conditions, etc.)
- Ref. dropdown list: clean the resource type names

Identified possible enhancement features

- "Expert system" proposing renewals: based on a ideal mix of types of resources targeted per service (with constraints to be added to the extension), provide on time renewal proposals, according to different time scenarios (simulations).

- Introduce cell names (for better readability/maintenance)

- introduce parameters/dropdowns in the Pers worksheet

Collaboration and disclaimer

The extension is provided with no warranty.

Contributions to:
- identify issues
- fix issues
- improve features
- add features

to the extension are weicome.

Please cite the source of this file.

Homepage: https://github.com/flosta23/PL

Repository: https://github.com/flosta23/PL/blob/main/PL01.ods