Background
There are two different time planning levels within ictime:
- Work estimates on task/sub-task level (this functionality is provided by JIRA and ictime uses the data).
- Planning/estimates on component and project level.
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Please note that planning in ictime is always time-based. Even though you can assign a cost/price to you work for time you log, we do not offer budget planning at this stage, but just time-planning. |
Planning Approach
When you plan your project, especially in the beginning, you might only have a very high-level planning (e.g. time budgets on project or component level), and with the time, you can go more into details (tasks, sub-tasks). So you need to start planning with very rough numbers, but of course with the time, you want to benefit from being able to plan more in detail.
It also might happen that some people in general prefer to plan top-down and others want to plan bottom-up:
- top-down planning, where planning only takes place for project and maybe component,
- bottom-up planning, where plan figures for a project or component only arise from the plan figures for tasks and sub-tasks.
In fact both approaches have serious disadvantages. The first does not allow for control on lower levels, the second leads to a situation where the planning only gets complete towards the end of the project, because you usually can't pre-define all tasks and sub-tasks in the beginning of a project.
As a conclusion and to cover both needs, you need to set time budgets on a certain level, and at the same time, you want to use "calculated" time budgets that are derived from a more detailed planning on lower levels. How this can be reached is described in the following chapter.