[Mischka07]

Thanks Brian!

That does help a bit, it helps to make things flow quickly. I appreciate your and everyone else's assistance.

Mischka

[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. :(

[Brian]

noisebug, I'll make sure someone on the OmniPlan team sees this, but was it intended for the OmniFocus forum?

[skwirl]

Originally Posted by noisebug

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.

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.

This is a popular feature request that we want to add in a later version of OmniPlan. You mentioned that putting 20 projects into 1 OmniPlan file isn't feasible partly because there's no way to drop complete projects. One possible solution would be to hide completed projects by using the filter feature to only show tasks and/or groups that are incomplete. Not a perfect solution, but I thought I'd mention it in case you wanted to give that a try.