I don’t know whether I understand clearly what a Meeting type task means, but it does not seem to work as I expect, so I call for a little help. The manual says: “When a task is designated as a meeting, it will not be scheduled until all of the resources assigned to it are available”
So I created two resources:
Consultant: normal calendar (every workday 8-12, 13-17)
Meeting room: available every monday 8-12
I also created two tasks:
Task 1: Reading source documents:
starts on: a monday 8:00 (locked);
duration: 1w2h;
resource: Consultant (100%);
allocation: adjust task effort;
type: independent
Task 2: Meet clients:
duration: 4h;
resources: Consultant (100%) and Meeting room (100%);
allocation: adjust task effort;
type: Meeting
After turning on auto-leveling, the meeting type Task 2 gets scheduled on Monday from 10:00 to 15:00 although Meeting room is not available in this range, so I think the task should be scheduled a week later.
Consultant’s total hours are: 1w6h (1w2h for Task 1 and 4h for Task 2), Meeting room’s total hours are: 2h but Task 2 has a total effort of 4h not 6h.
Is this the normal scheduling behavior, am I missing something?
@horvatha Sorry for the trouble! It looks like you’ve encountered a bug in the most recent version of OmniPlan - in previous versions of OmniPlan, the effort for this task correctly displayed as 6h. I’ll file a bug in our development database so that we can look into addressing this behavior in a forthcoming update!
That said, we do have an open feature request to handle meeting room scheduling natively in OmniPlan - I’ll attach your comments to that as well, since it seems like you’d find that functionality useful in your workflow!
Thank you for the answer. One question remains though - at least for me, maybe: what is the “mechanics” of the “Meeting” type task? Omniplan simply waits for each and every resource to become available to schedule the task but the resources don’t have to stay available during the whole duration of the task?
@horvatha Great question! I double checked with one of the OmniPlan engineers, and it looks like you’re essentially running up against a limitation of OmniPlan’s scheduling tool (as well as the bug I mentioned earlier).
When a meeting task is scheduled, the task is scheduled such that effort only occurs when all of the resources assigned to the task are available to work. However, there is currently no way to tell OmniPlan that a task requires a continuous block of time to complete. So this can result in a task starting as soon as all of the assigned resources are available, but only completing after a stretch of time that isn’t available in the work schedule.
It’s more obvious that this is happening if you switch the meeting task in your example to the “Adjust Task Duration” resource allocation option. After leveling, this is the schedule that OmniPlan produces:
In this screenshot, effort is actually only being done on the task from 10am to noon on the first day, and then from 8am to 10am on the second (when the Meeting Room resource is available).
We do have an open feature request for the ability to designate that a task requires a continuous block of time to complete - I’ll attach your comments to that request as well! We’ll keep your use case in mind as we continue to develop OmniPlan, but for the time being I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this limitation causes you!
Hi, am Lerina
According to me, Omniplan simply waits for each and every resource to become available to schedule the task but the resources don’t have to stay available during the whole duration of the task?
