[noisebug]

I work for a Mac based Design Agency. I am looking at Merlin 2 and OmniPlan. I REALLY want to use OmniPlan but the limitation is what this thread is talking about. Switching between different project files "quickly" is not good enough. I need to balance projects.

We have a group of designers 5, support staff 3, developers 2, and myself as a project planner.

We do: Websites, Campaigns, Design Work

We use Daylite to track project tasks, but we need a "setup" tool to align all of our projects before it gets entered into Daylite. Why? Because Daylite doesn't balance tasks very well.

IE., In Daylite I can have 3 projects, but if I look at my tasks there is no hiarchy, just a list of TODO's. This doesn't work for our designers because of work-load-balancing. A designer can have 2 tasks on the same day that take 8 hours. With me so far? Micromanaging everyones tasks is not the answer, were talking about hundreds of tasks, etc.

What I need from OmniPlan is to plan everyones "major" project out, whether its a website or campaign. These projects are complex, requiring hundreds of tasks.

In addition, if 1 designer is working on 3 projects I want to load balance my team. So while Omni Plan does this for 1 project, I need this function for multiple projects. So I can view all 30 websites and 5 campaigns we are working on ... and know where the bottlenecks are, where people are getting stuck.

My imagined workflow is this:

1. Plan Project 1, Project 2, Project 3
2. Attach Project 1, 2, 3 into one list... now I can see where activities overlap and adjust accordingly. Once I align everything, I export into Daylite.
3. Plan Project 4
4. Attach to Project 1,2,3 and see if 4 overlaps with any of those.
5. Rinse and repeat

We "could" manage 1 massive OmniPlan file with everything in it.. but with 20 projects under one file this is just not feasible. In addition, I would like to drop "complete" projects from the master file... deleting old projects is not the way to go.

Until this function is implemented, I really see OmniPlan useful for personal use or tiny shops that are working on one project at a time. For bigger teams where tasks and responsibilities overlap, unfortunately it is just not ready for that.

...which is too bad because I really love the Omni Group. :(