Why is Reschedule moving tasks into the past?

OmniPlan
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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.

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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
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