Spread effort based on duration and total effort
 

I haven't seen a way to do this, but the primary way we are required to plan effort is to determine total effort required to accomplish a task, then the dates of the task to fit in the overall schedule, from this we'll get the number of hours required to accomplish the task by month. Schedules are then adjusted to level headcount (effort) as much as possible.

Example:
Task: Develop Draft Test Plan, estimated hours 312, Start date 8/1/05, End date 9/30/05. This yields 142 hours in Aug-05, 135 hours in Sep-05, and 35 hours in Oct-05 based on the following accounting months:

8/1-8/28 (160 hours)
8/28-9/25 (152 hours)
9/26-10/30 (200 hours)

Currently we use MS Project to determine the dates and have to use a flakey Excel spreadsheet to calculate the hours. I was hoping to be able to do this with OmniPlan's leveling feature, unfortunately I have to accomplish this backwards by calculating resource percentage. Would it be possible for a preference to allow the percentage (assigned amount) to be calculated from the effort/duration?

In addition, it would be nice to be able to display the effort in hours (for budgeting reasons) and the duration in days.

Thanks,
David

I have filed a feature request for the ability to calculate the assigned resource percentage using effort and duration.

I have also filed a feature request to use multiple duration units when displaying effort and duration instead of one. In the mean time, you can get figures in both hours and days by checking them on and off in the "Project : Formatting" inspector.