I’ve been noticing a concerning problem with the Reschedule feature in OmniPlan: after running Reschedule, I can see some of my tasks get relocated into the past, i.e. before today. Shouldn’t Reschedule move all incomplete tasks into the future? Why is anything moving backward?
It’s happened a few times, but I was able to capture a screen recording of it. What in the world would cause this to happen? I planned to frequently reschedule my projects, but I feel hesitant to do it after seeing this happen a couple times.
Are there are any situations where this is expected to happen, and how can I avoid it?
In the video below, the light blue column represents “today” as of the day I recorded this. After the reschedule, you can see many of the tasks slide to the left, i.e. before today. In this project, there were no violations before or after rescheduling.
I contacted OmniPlan support about this, and they were very helpful. I’m sharing their response here in case anyone comes across this post later.
The problem was that I had automatic leveling on for my project (Project | Automatically Level Resources) and the last time I’d run Level, the setting “Don’t schedule any task before now (or current editing date).” was checked.
I didn’t realize the settings you use on this screen are used for the next automatic leveling. So when I rescheduled, the project also automatically leveled itself and some of the tasks ended up with an invalid schedule.
The two ways to fix this are
turn off automatic leveling and level yourself, or
run a Level with that “Don’t schedule any task before now (or current editing date)” setting unchecked, so automatic leveling will run without that setting
