Hi. Searched the forums and could not find an answer, and couldn’t accomplish it as well.
Scenario:
Project with 5 independent tasks.
Team with 5 people.
Each task takes 5 days (so if done by a single person, project would take 5 business weeks).
Some tasks are only doable by 1 person, others can be done in parallel up by 3 people, etc
I don’t care which of the 5 people does which task.
Expectation:
Assuming the project starts on a Monday, I want to:
Tell OmniPlan that “Task 1 and 2 can have a maximum of 2 people working on it”, “Task 3 and 4 a maximum of 1”, and “Task 5 a maximum of 3”
Level the project and see the team’s resource being used accordingly:
2.0 See all tasks starting on Monday
2.1 Task 1 & 2 each with a duration of 2.5 days, ending together on mid-Wednesday
2.2 Task 3 & 4 each with a duration of 5 days, ending together on Friday
2.3 Task 5 with a duration of 3.33 days, ending some time on Thursday
Remove Person 5 & re-level
Watch Task 5 change duration from 3.33 days to 2.5, but now starting Wednesday and finishing Friday
Reality:
I can’t seem to accomplish that. Is that possible?
One of our OmniPlan engineers suggests the following option to achieve close to what you’re looking for:
"Make a resource group containing the 5 people, assign each task to the group. Select tasks 1 and 2, and in the assignments inspector, double-click on the text where it says “100% out of 500%”, this means one full person out of the five in the group. Type “200%” instead and press return. This changes those two tasks to need two people working on it. Repeat for Task 5, but change it to “300%”. Level as desired…
This isn’t EXACTLY what the user wants, since it requires N people working on the task, rather than a maximum of N people (OmniPlan won’t ever automatically assign fewer people and let the task take longer, even if that would be better in some particular circumstance), but it is very close."
Thanks for your reply here and via email too. As explained on email, this is indeed only a partial workaround.
If I understood it right, this way wouldn’t allow me to execute step #3 above – I’d have to manually adjust everything after (from 500% to 400%) for example.
Can we get a public facing list of your feature request backlog, maybe something like uservoice.com where people could vote and get the visibility of where their desired features are and when are they possibly going to get done?
