Set Tasks Relative To End Date?
 

I'm looking for a way to set tasks and milestones relative to the end date of a project -- I have a fixed release schedule and really need to determine how many tasks I can achieve within a given release as opposed to adding tasks to a start date milestone to determine when I'll be finished.

Ideally I'd like to set a GA milestone to be the end of the project and then have other milestones and tasks set to end-of-project minus 1w, minus 2w and so on for example -- in this way I'll be able to determine when I need to start the project.

Is this possible -- other posts in the forums have alluded to this kind of reverse timing behaviour but with no resolution other than this might be a future enhancement?

Regards

G

Should have added, I'm using OmniPlan 1.5 (v143) on OS X 10.4.11.

Planning backwards (as late as possible) is not in OmniPlan 1.5. The soonest version you might see this in is version 2.0, but we don't have a release date announced yet. We'll post more info about 2.0 as we inch closer to the beta release candidates.

[QUOTE=akwong;34399]Planning backwards (as late as possible) is not in OmniPlan 1.5. The soonest version you might see this in is version 2.0, but we don't have a release date announced yet. We'll post more info about 2.0 as we inch closer to the beta release candidates.[/QUOTE]

Any indication -- however rough -- as to when a beta of 2.0 might see the light of day?

OmniPlan 2.0: As we've mentioned elsewhere on this forum, that time is probably best measured in months, but we're really not certain.

Scheduling Backwards: you can accomplish most of the same thing if you create dependencies from the tasks & milestones to the final milestone with the appropriate lag times. If you lock the start date of the final milestone, then the preceding tasks won't move the final milestone if they run out of time. Instead, they'll create a violation.

Then you can fix this violation by removing some tasks, or moving the project start date earlier, and all the tasks will rearrange themselves appropriately.

Lizard -- thanks for the suggestions -- I'll give them a try.

I'm testing out OmniPlan to see if it would work for my situation. I make websites, mostly on my own, with the occasional subcontracting work
I'm trying to setup a few projects in one file using groups ('cause managing a single project is pretty pointless in my case... multitasking is second nature by now... ;)

What I tried to do is enter all the tasks, set up the due dates as milestones, setup dependencies within "projects" (groups) but not between each "projects." Then I hit the "level" button and I thought Omniplan would figure out what needs to be done first in order to meet the deadlines (milestones) but it only gives me violation warnings.

It seems that it' hard wired to the order the tasks are listed in the task view... I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong here, I mean, I'm not a professional project manager, but in my experience, deadlines tell you when you have to work, not the other way around... It would seem pretty crucial for this type of software to be able to take deadlines in considerations...

I should point out, only 2 projects had deadline, but Omniplan seems to put them last in the chronology because they're listed last, whereas the other projects are listed first but don't have milestones so could be completed later on... Again, I didn't link them with any dependency so I don't get it...

[B]edit:[/B] clearing the leveling and setting "constrain" dates instead of milestones on task groups fixed my problem - should have read the manual before posting... sorry about that :)

What am I doing wrong? :P