I am using OmniPlan for a microwave network replacement/deployment in the
New Mexico desert. It’s a large-ish project that involves 10 sites, 5
climbers, 3 network engineers, 2 managers, 4 trucks, and a passel of gear
that’ll fill a small warehouse. It’s scheduled to take about 10-14 weeks.
One of the issues we have on this project is remote nature of the sites.
Some of the sites take hours to drive to from the nearest lodging. This
means that every work day, the crew working of these sites has a multi-hour
commute to the site at the beginning of the day and then again back to the
hotel at the end of the day. This is a major time component for these
sites and really cuts into the work that can be realized on any particular
work day and must be accounted for in the schedule. For example, if I have
a radio replacement that begins toward the end of the day and won’t be
complete before it’s time to start back to the hotel, we shouldn’t start
that replacement on that day, but begin the replacement on the following
day… after the following day’s commute to the site.
Another issue is the length of the workday and the tasks assigned during this span of time where the commutes are onerous. If I schedule a 10 hour work day throughout the project, while were at these remote sites, we can really achieve only 6 hours of time that contribute toward accomplishing tasks. The other 4 hours are spent driving but I need to account for the time and the budget that eats and not allow network related tasks to use that time in the workday.
An issue I’m having is scheduling this drive time into each day. As the
schedule adjusts, this drive time will behave like any other task and move
around and if the tasks during any given day also adjust due to effort or
resource scheduling, I have to go into each day by hand and enter a drive
time task at the beginning and end of each day… pushing everything past
those days. So, any change in a day that requires this non-trivial drive
time means that I have to go into each task following and edit it by hand.
This makes an almost untennable editing task if even a trivial change is
required.
So, is there a way to enter scheduled/known tasks that are over a span of
time (like the drive time at the beginning and end of each day for
particular sites) so that no matter what happens around them, they remain
consistent and the tasks in between can move and stretch as needed?
Thanks for the great product!
