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-   -   Resources in different time zones / schedules (http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=14473)

rcusick 2009-11-10 08:16 AM

Resources in different time zones / schedules
 
Does anyone have a good solution for scheduling resources across multiple time zones, where the workday definition is not consistent. We have people working in 3 time zones, and when we have testing cycles between the dev team and the QA group, straight up scheduling gives the impression that there can be a lot of back-and forth. In most cases people are working on completely different schedules.

Looking for any ideas or experiences with this kind of challenge. Thanks in advance.

FrustyCronch 2009-11-15 02:25 PM

I posted a similar message just now, not seeing yours (although I did use the term "time zone" in a forum search ... hmmm).

rcusick 2009-11-17 08:38 AM

This may require a whole lot of complexity, but if each resource could have their own work week, and that was integrated into the time line some how, that would solve this.

I guess I'm going to have to work this out some other way.

whpalmer4 2009-11-17 10:26 AM

Each resource can have its own work week, although the UI doesn't make this convenient to implement if by a different work week you mean one that is 8 or 9 time zones away from the rest of the crowd.

One problem that I've discovered while playing around with this is that tasks assigned to multiple resources will be scheduled as soon as [b]one[/b] of the resources is available. Some of the time this is what you want (support ninjas, handle today's email), and some of the time (a meeting, for example) this won't do. I haven't found a way of marking a task to indicate that it can only be scheduled when all of the resources are available. You can schedule the task manually by setting constraints, but you don't get any help in figuring out when a good time would be.

skwirl 2009-11-17 11:30 AM

Time zone support for resources is something we don't handle right now but there is a feature request for this in our database.

A "meeting" task as whpalmer4 mentioned is also another feature request in our database. There isn't a way to specify that a task needs to wait until all resources are available before work can begin.

whpalmer4 2009-11-17 01:52 PM

It's a bit more general than a meeting, of course. Any time you have a need to schedule a task involving multiple resources with work schedules (not just people) you've got the same issue. For a lot of projects the issue doesn't turn up because the stuff is available during all the normal working hours.

skwirl 2009-11-17 02:46 PM

I just refer to it as a meeting task since it's an easy example, but you're right, it is more general than meetings. :-)

whpalmer4 2009-11-17 04:19 PM

You know it, I know it, we just have to make sure that the engineer knows it, because we know how much they love meetings, it'll never get done otherwise :-)


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