Merlin – copy activities quickly into the library
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 23. August 2010
Merlin’s library is a very practical feature. You can place there project structures, elements or documents often used in your projects and find contacts of your AddressBook, Entourage or an LDAP server to use as resources in new projects.
To place new objects into your library you can use drag & drop. An even quicker way is to right (or ctrl) click your selection and call “Copy to Library”
Easy, isn’t it?
You may want to watch the relevant video on YouTube
Related posts:
Tags: Library, Merlin, Merlin 101
Merlin, global unit for calculated durations
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 15. June 2010
From time to time we receive requests on how to set up a global unit for calculated durations. So for example:
…when planning my project in Merlin, the calculated duration of the project is
shown in a dynamic unit, i.e. day, week, month, year, depending on the
length of the activity. How do I fix it to show weeks? We mainly operate in
weeks…
Well nothing simpler than that. (more…)
Tags: Durations, Merlin, Merlin 101, Units
Merlin, time units
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 9. June 2010
Project management with Merlin on Mac OS X is easy. With Merlin you can plan tasks requiring only some seconds, days, weeks or years of your resource’s time. It all works like a charm. Merlin can handle short or long durations just as well.
To make things even easier, Merlin is implemented this way, that you don’t need to spell out the time unit. You can use the first one or two letters of the unit and expect the application to recognize it according to the list below.
- se OR sec = Seconds
- min OR mi = Minutes
- h OR ho = Hours
- d OR da = Days
- w OR we = Weeks
- m OR mo = Months
- y = Years
We’ve told you it’s easy, haven’t we?
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Photo found here, copyright Partick Hoff
Tags: Merlin, Merlin 101, Time, Units
Merlin Sharing – managing ports
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 18. May 2010
Do you want to enable project, web or iPhone sharing on your Merlin and get an error message, that the ports are already used?
Could it be that you are trying to enable project sharing on top of a running Merlin Server? In this case, simply copy the project file in the shared folder of Merlin Server for it it be shared.
Tags: Merlin 101, Merlin Server, Merlin Sharing, Merlin Web, Preferenes, TCP port
Merlin: Reporting ways
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 5. May 2010
One of the main responsibilities of a PM is to report regularly project relevant information. This could be the project’s current state, cost forecasts, current balance between budget and actual costs to name just a few. When you use Merlin for project management on Mac OS X, there are various ways to create these reports out of your Merlin projects:
- You may export your project as a CSV file to drop in a spreadsheet and calculate further using the planned, expected, and actual values.
- Export into iCal files (ics) and have your project events transferred into calendar applications.
- You can also go the obvious way: File > New report… and select one of the report templates Merlin offers*
Just another possibility you might not know by now, is…
Tags: Export, Merlin, Merlin 101, Pages, Reports
Merlin: Planning activities
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 27. April 2010
Merlin is very flexible. It allows to plan activities for accomplishing your project in various ways. In this post we will show 5 ways resulting from the following 5 situations:
- The activity should start on project initiation and there is an estimation about the needed work.
- The activity should start just after a previous activity is done and there is an estimation about the needed work.
- There is an estimation about the needed work and a fixed duration within this work should be accomplished.
- The activity should start on a specific date and there is an estimation about the needed work.
- The activity should start and end on specific dates.
So let’s start from the beginning. (more…)
Tags: Date constrains, Merlin, Merlin 101, Planing activities
Merlin: 24h calendar
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 20. April 2010
Sometimes you plan activities in projects, which can be done by equipment. Machines or computer which may run unattended, do not need regular working hours and can work 24h a day, 7days a week. Surely you have assigned real person as resources for activities in the past and you know how to do this in Merlin, but how to proceed when having equipment resources?
The good news? This is as easy as setting up person resources.
Tags: 24h, Calendar, Equipment, Merlin, Merlin 101, Resources
Merlin: Material units for resources
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 20. April 2010
Merlin supports many types of resources. They are:
Person: equivalent to a worker or individual.
Company: Contractor (group or individuals), suppliers, etc.
Equipment: Machinery, tools, etc
Material: Raw materials, supplies.
Materials differ from the other types in that they don’t do any of the work on which they are assigned to and have an option for you to determine their measuring unit. For example, you can choose the material unit “kg” , and your standard rate becomes cost per kg.
If you like to use another unit (’piece’ for example ) than the pre-defined ones, simply type it in the appropriate text edit field of the inspector:
Tags: Custom units, Material, Materials, Merlin, Merlin 101, Resources, Units
Merlin: Project Settings for Combined Projects
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 14. April 2010
If you wish to observe and manage multiple projects in one Gantt chart, you can combine them into one, Master, project. To do so in Merlin you can either use drag & drop or a menu command:
Once you have combined your projects we suggest you focus onto the ‘Utilization‘ view for detecting over-allocations. All resources together with their assignments on all combined projects will be listed there.
Although the projects are combined now into one master file, the following issues need to be kept in mind.
- Changes to each file will be saved back to the individual file
- Each project has it own calendar, settings, resources and resources calendars
- Dependencies that cross projects can not be created
- If resources are used across multiple combined projects, you will see multiple instances of the same resource in the Resources View. This is expected behavior. Resources having the same name will be considered as ‘Master’ resources and their utilization for all assignments on all combined projects will be accumulated in Utilization view.
How to access Project Settings for Combined Projects?
Tags: Combine Projects, Master, Merlin, Merlin 101, Project Settings, Utilization
Merlin, Risk Management
Vicky Stamatopoulou on 13. April 2010
Reading about Risk Management on the web, one could get really mixed up. Some propagate its importance and need exactly as described in the traditional risk management. Others find that there are likely to be significant problems with this approach:
The most fundamental problem comes down to the psychology of risk and language. Projects are all about achieving objectives by set timescales i.e. positive ventures, Risk is a negative entity so to get people to think and talk openly about their risks can be a challenge to say the least.
A yet again different approach is to put your Project Management Team at risk. Similar to the statement, use it if you don’t want to loose it, for keeping your management agility it could be a good thing to be slightly out of control. A challenged and uncomfortable team will be more open to changes and willing to improvements.
Risk Management in Merlin is done by the use of risk elements:
Insert menu > Element > Risk
Risk elements can be attached to the project, activities or project phases. This will allow you to mitigate the risk. Visit all your risks when your project is done and evaluate how successful your planning was in dealing with them. Retaining your risk data in your project provides a unique perspective on it later on.
Read here more about using Merlin’s Risk Management
Tags: Merlin, Merlin 101, Risk Management, Risks
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