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Hi all,

I havent found a way to do the following:
I enter a task and assign an effort of - say - 96 hours to it.
(I have no resources in the project by now)
I would then like to also assign a duration to that task without affecting the effort.
So basically I want to tell omniplan: "this tasks requires 96 mh and we will carry it out during the next 2 months"

Havent found that option by now.
What am I missing ?

Thanks in advance

Heiko
 
At present this is something you'd have to do by modifying a resource assignment. That is, you'll have to first assign a resources to it, then modify the assignment. The other limitation as currently implemented is that you'll have to do some math.

By default, when you modify assignments the effort of the task remains fixed while the duration changes. That is, if you add a second resource to a task, the duration will be halved but the effort remains the same. This what you want here, so so far so good (you can change this setting on the Task: Assignments inspector though).

So now you have a 96 hour task with one or more resources assigned to it, but you want to spread it out over 2 months. To make that happen, we need to figure out what percentage of the resources' time needs to be spent, on average, to get us there ("A"). We define a month as 160 hours, 320 * A = 96, solve for A -> 30%. Or 15% of two resources.

A bit cumbersome. We have been looking at a way to do it in a more direct fashion by simply feeding the app separate values for effort and duration and completely unlinking them. The trick is figuring out how do to that without making the interaction between resource efficiency, resource units, assignment percentages, task effort, and task duration even more complex and difficult to understand.

-Tom
 
Another consideration from a real-life perspective is that if your task is X hours of work over Y months, it's unlikely that work on the task will be uniformly accomplished at X/Y hours/month, especially if that works out to be some small percentage of the resource. Much more likely than someone spending exactly 17 minutes each day for months is that there will be bursts of intense activity, and stretches with little or no activity. The planning exercise is useful for totting up the total utilization of a resource over some period, so the temptation to add "just one more" 5% task to the resource that already has 20 such assignments can be more easily resisted, but it has to be remembered that progress will be lumpy, as any given day is likely to be 5 tasks worked at 20% (and 15 left fallow) rather than 20 tasks worked for exactly 24 minutes each :-)
 
 


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