So I’m coming back to OF after a while… and am a bit confused about what how OF defines a project.
I am in charge of a few large projects, each of which has a number of different work packages within it…
So for example (I work in healthcare in the UK)
‘Outpatient transformation’ is the project, within which I have several work packages to deliver…
Schedule workshops with clinical teams
– actions then are things like find date, room, create agenda for each different clinical team
Create resources for clinical teams to support transfer to a new software package
– actions are set up T&F group; create timetable; share timetable with primary care etc etc.
And so on.
I have all these under one OF Project - Outpatient Transformation with each work package as an action group
The problem with how I have this set up is that the options for a group of actions are different for those of a project. For example I can pause a project but not an action group.
Am I confusing my big project ‘Outpatient transformation’ with what OF thinks should be a project?
Should I be converting what I’ve set as action groups into OF projects, and putting them all in a folder called ‘Outpatient transformation’
I want to use OF to the max so want to get this right before I go populating a load more stuff into it.
An OF project can be anything you want it to be, but what you’re doing sounds more like Programme management, for which OmniPlan may be a better tool.
Going back to my Prince2 training, a project is something which has a defined outcome, with tolerances around timescale, cost, and sometimes quality.
GTD’s definition has a similar intent of something you want to achieve which has multiple steps.
OmniFocus is a personal action management tool, and this is where you’re hitting problems. An action group is not a project.
You do have a few options in OmniFocus though
use a folder for the overall “Project” and make each Work Package an indivdual OF Project. Then you can pause any OF project
Proceed as you are currently. Create a Tag (E.g. Project Paused) and mark that tag’s status as Paused in the Inspector. Then for an action group you want to put on hold, Tag it with the Project Paused Tag, that will grey out the Action Group.
If you’re getting heavy though from a project management perspective, I would say that OmniFocus is the wrong tool.
As a fellow user of OF in an NHS day job I have some sense of the complexity of your “transformation” task (!) and I would endorse creating smaller individual OF projects in an enclosing folder to give you done of the granularity you’re looking for.
As Geoffairey writes, OmniFocus’s notion of a project is any desired outcome that takes more than one step. It comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
Allen, who originally developed his system to be implemented on paper, recommended making a list of all your projects, reviewing it regularly, and for each, identifying the next action that you can take to move it forward and the tools or place you need for that action (the context—office, phone, library, etc.). He discouraged people from making detailed plans, because it can let planning get in the way of doing.
It was a long time before the Omni developers added action groups, which some people call subprojects, because it seemed to complicate the system unnecessarily, but they did finally acknowledge that there were non-GTD-based users of OF who really wanted the feature. For the same reason, it was a long time before an action could have more than one context (now called “tag”).
If you don’t want to use a dedicated project management app for a complex project like yours, I agree with the advice to use a folder for the “project” and OF projects for the Work Packages. It’s a testament to OF’s flexibility that you can make it work. But it’s not ideal if you need to deal precisely with resources, dependencies, total time estimates, etc.; planning software is much more powerful in that regard, though the learning curve is even steeper.
