I need to track and forecast tasks that span across work-hours. For example, if the office work hours are 8am to 6pm but there is an automated engineering process that starts at 6pm with a dependent task that starts at 8am the next day, then I need to show and track that.
I can’t seem to do this without setting my work-day to 24 hours but that then creates the opposite problem of having all all tasks being allocated across the 24 hour time period.
Effectively, what I need is Day/Night status days such that I can specify whether tasks are Day only, Night only, or span across both.
You can model this in OmniPlan by creating a new resource (e.g. “build server”), setting its availability (in the Calendar view) to be 24 hours/day, and assigning your overnight task to that resource. That resource will do its work on that task overnight, so (assuming the task isn’t too long and that resource isn’t overloaded with other tasks) it can complete before the office opens again at 8am the next day.
To visualize the timeline of those overnight dependencies on the Gantt chart, you can switch to View > Non-Working Time > All so you can see what’s happening while the office is closed. View > Non-Working Time > None will switch the Gantt chart back to showing you the normal view of what happens during your project’s standard work day.
