If I set up a task for Bob at 100% effort and the guidance is it will take him 40 hours to complete the task. As I have a cost assigned to Bob of $50 per hour I have a theoretical effort of 40 hours and theoretical cost of $2000 for his participation in that task that I can then apply to the project budget.
However during execution Bob actually only takes 30 hours to fully complete the task. I set the task to complete, but I need a way to show the actual effort as 30 hours and the actual cost as $1500.
@pixie The best way to achieve this is probably by updating the total task effort from the theoretical 40 hours to the actual 30 hours for the task before marking it complete. If you’d like to compare the actual duration of the task to the planned duration, you could set a baseline before updating the task with this information.
I’d like to use OmniPlan to help track how well a project is progressing as compared to a budget. For example, if I have an initial estimate that a task–“draft brief”–will take me 4 hours I set up a task with a 4 hour duration. But after spending 4 hours drafting the brief, I find that I’m still not finished and am at least two hours from being done.
How do I update OmniPlan to reflect this?
How can I compare my new expected cost against the original budgeted cost?
(Relatedly: OmniPlan seems designed for me to know percentages complete at any given time. Is there any way to make it so the percentage complete slider adjusts the number of hours actually used on a task instead?)
@cpac I hope you find the information above helpful!
While it is not currently possible to change the completion slider from percentage to hours complete, the actual time spent/remaining can be entered into the Task Info Inspector:
First, I should mention that I’m using iOS, not a Mac. The iOS task info editor shows only a percentage for completion. Is there some way to change this to hours? I assume not, but thought I should ask.
Second, I’ve tried what you outline above. Once I adjust the Effort for the task upwards, I can see that difference vs. the baseline in Gantt chart, which gives me a visual picture of the difference vs. the budget. But actually quantifying that difference is more difficult. I can estimate it based on the Gantt chart, but is there any way for me to get a report of baseline vs. actual Effort or Cost?
The big picture here is that I’d really like to find the right solution for planning and tracking compliance with a budget. But I’m having difficulty figuring out whether OmniPlan can help me with that or not.
@cpac Thanks for clarifying! OmniPlan for iOS does not currently offer the ability to increment task completion in hours. I’ll file a feature request for this functionality in our development database and attach your comments!
The Earned Value Analysis feature offered by the the Pro version of OmniPlan 3 for Mac likely offers the type of reporting calculations you’re looking for (specifically it sounds like schedule variance reporting, which is described in this section of the OmniPlan for Mac manual, would be useful to you). Unfortunately, this is not a feature set that we’ve brought to the iOS version of OmniPlan yet. If you would like to try this feature set out in OmniPlan for Mac, a 2 week trial of the Mac app is available for download on our website.
@ains, Thank you, again. The Earned Value Analysis sounds like what I’m looking for. Alas, I used up my two week of free trial a while ago before I knew what to look for. Any chance of getting EVA support in the iOS version?
@cpac We have an open feature request to bring the feature to iOS! I’ll attach your comments there too.
If you’d like to give the Mac app another try, our sales team should be able to help you out with a trial extension! They can be reached at sales@omnigroup.com.
