Feature Request: Task outlines
 

I got to thinking what feature(s) would make OmniPlan awesome, and I came up with one. One of my big gripes of project mgmt software is that it doesn't really connect to the development process of the project. At some point you have folks guessing what percentage complete a task is, no matter how many times you break down the task.

I use OmniOutliner for this, but it does require that the PM (or someone) collect outlines and determine percentage completion based upon checked sub-tasks in the outline. This lets and encourages developers to detail out their tasks without pushing that detail into the project plan.

This seems like a perfect and pretty easy thing for OmniPlan to do. That way developers don't need to be exposed to OmniPlan at all, just OmniOutliner. To enable the team usage, I would setup a shared folder for all the outlines, and enable the dropping of alias's into the OmniPlan document, and have it maintain the links. This kind of outlining could also be supported inside of OmniPlan, which would be cool too. This is not the same as just defining sub-tasks, which are estimated and actualized. It is more like enabling steps that can be checked off that are used to calculate the percentage complete of a task.

An interesting thought -- OmniOutliner as lightweight client for team-members.

Clearly OmniPlan uses OmniOutliner code for the outline view, and there's already basic interoperability between the two, so it should be interesting to see how this can be extended.

One basic improvement would be 'import into a file' support, so that you could easily draw together task lists from multiple users (of OO) -- at the moment you'd need to consolidate OO files in OO first, but importing into OP would provide import field matching.