[ambi]

What I would like (very much) to see improved is exactly what whpalmer4, and falcovandermaden have said. I'm certain I am not alone.

Ken, when you say that OmniPlan supports multiple projects, what do you mean? Certainly I can just make separate OmniPlan documents and maintain all of them independently. You don't mean that *that* is support of multiple projects do you? The problem with that is I have resources spread over several projects. What happens if I want to shift some resources from one project to another (say, go from a 50-50 split to a 70-30 split if I have only 2 projects)? Don't I then have to go to each document and manually change each file, and then ensure (again manually) that the resource is utilized at exactly 100%? You can see, I hope, how that is not tenable, especially if I have more than 2 projects and more than two resources. Yet our project manager needs to do such shifting around all the time. Another suggestion was to use one document but keep projects as separate groups. I don't know if this solves the resource sharing option, but, even if it does, we have problems with the critical path. Maybe 2.0 solves this? Can you have multiple critical paths running in parallel for different milestones?

To answer your question whether or not I'd want each project to be able to participate in a single shared resource pool, my answer is an emphatic yes. In fact that is *exactly* what I mean by supporting multiple projects. (Thank you for being more clear and less snarky than I was.) I want to be able to distribute our (scarce!) resources (mostly people) among our projects in an optimal way so as to maximize our productivity and meet our deadlines. Each of our people is involved in several of our projects, and I want to provide guidance to them regarding how much they should focus on each of their projects.

Your question about exploring alternate resource-allocation scenarios is exactly what I want to be able to do, and that I have great trouble doing in the current version. (Note that I haven't played with v2.0 yet.) I want to able to say "Right, persons X and Y need to devote 80%, not 60% to project A in order to meet our deadline. But how then does affect the other projects?" Currently, it's relatively easy to change the percentages within a project, but it is tedious and error-prone to see what effect that has on the other projects. I also want to easily be able to answer questions like "How is person X's time spread among their various projects?" There is currently no easy way to do that.

Does that help explain the problem?