OAE Feature Announcement: Distribution Saves Time

What Is Distribution?

The OAE Distribution feature lets estimators easily distribute the values from one work item to other work items based on specified criteria.

Distribution is a special configuration that can be enabled for any work item in OAE. Use it any time you need to apply values proportionately across a set of work items. It’s highly configurable, and can be used many ways.

Once you’ve applied a distribution, a new line item is added to each target work item indicating it’s from a distribution, the work item it’s from, and the percentage of the estimation value applied. So if the results don’t come out the way you intended, you know just where to go to fix it.

Why Do I Need It?

The larger and more complex a project gets, the more time estimators can lose doing calculations themselves and manually entering the results. And in order to estimate accurately and quickly at scale, you can’t afford to waste any time on repetitive, error-prone work.

You might have costs that are determined at the project level, so you need to apply a percentage of that to a set of work items. You might have equipment whose costs are estimated for the whole project and need to be included in every work item. OAE Distribution meets these needs and more.

Sample Use Cases

Equipment

Say you’ll be using a compressor for a variety of work items in a project. You create one work item to cover all the related costs of the assorted work the compressor will be used for. But in order for the estimates for those assorted work items to be accurate, you need to apply the right portion of the compressor’s cost to each work item. So you turn Distribution on for the compressor’s work item, and configure it to distribute the estimates to those assorted work items based on (for instance) the total cost of each work item, using the Units rate card aggregate.

Support

Or consider Support hours – like QA. The more labor hours required for a work item, the more QA there is to do. Instead of manually adding QA hours to each work item, an OAE estimator can build a QA work item (e.g. as part of a Support Plan), turn on Distribution for it, and configure it to distribute in proportion to total labor hours in each of the target work items.

Components of the OAE Distribution Feature

There are three components to a distribution: Filters, Metrics, and Overrides.

Filters

Filters let you use various criteria to choose which other work items to distribute your work item to – the target work items. You can also use Overrides to explicitly choose certain work items – see below. A filter has four components:

• The Type of filter
• A Field tied to the Type
• The comparison Logic
• The value to compare to what’s in the Field

For instance, you could add a filter that says to select all the work items whose rate card name is A. You can add as many filters as you need to select all the target work items.

There are four filter types to choose from:

• Rate Card: Choose all the work items that are assigned to one or more rate cards.
• Work Item: Choose other work items based on text in the Code or Name fields. For example, you may want to distribute a work item across all 100-xx-xxx work items.
• Custom Property: Distribute this work item across all work items based on one or more work item custom properties.
• Period: Choose all the work items that belong to one or more project periods.

When you choose a Type, the options for Field update to match.

Metrics

Once you’ve added a filter or three to select the work items you want to distribute this work item’s estimation values to, the Metrics section of the OAE Distribution feature lets you determine whether the distributed values will be evenly distributed, or distributed based on a pattern you provide. Distribution patterns can be based on rate cards and other components of the work item (e.g. the estimation columns defined for the project, or Aggregate Points like COGS), or based proportionally on one of the work item’s custom properties.

For instance, you could add a Metric that says to distribute the values based on the Units column in the rate card, for all rate cards.

There are three types of Metric to choose from:

• Estimate Component: Distributes the values based on an estimation column, or on aggregate hours, or on the rate card
• Even Distribution: Distributes the values evenly across all the target work items
• Custom Property: Distributes the values across the target work items proportionally based on the value of the selected work item custom property. Note that only only custom properties of types Number or Integer can be options for Custom Property, since math has to be done on their values.

To apply a Custom Property Metric, you just choose the property. To apply an Estimate Component Metric, you choose the granularity (either a particular estimation column or all of them) and whether to compute based on an aggregate point or a rate card column.

Overrides

Sometimes there are work items you never want to distribute to, or always want to, no matter what filters are applied. Or you may need to use a fixed value for the selected work item, rather than the calculated values your Metrics specify. Overrides let you do that.

There are three parts to adding an Override:

• Choosing the work item
• Choosing the Type of Override, which can be one of these:
  • Always Include: The work item will always be included in the Distribution.
  • Exclude: The work item will never be included in the Distribution.
  • Fixed Percentage: Sets a specific percentage value to apply to the selected work item.
  • Fixed Metric Value: When distributing based on Estimate Component or Custom Property, defines a specific value to apply for the selected work item, instead of the actual value calculated by the distribution logic.
• Providing a value if you choose one of the “fixed” Types

Get OAE Today

If you’re already using OAE, you get the OAE Distribution feature automatically. If you aren’t using OAE yet, contact us today to get started.