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We want to get OmniPlan's performance a little snappier. Help us out by letting us know how much stress you're under, how much you will subject OmniPlan to.

How many projects are you tracking at once?

How long is a typical project for you? (hours, weeks, years?)

How many tasks are in your projects?

How many resources are involved in a project?
 
Projects: 50-100, large variance in size. Some are broken out as individual projects even though they are small, just so we can track individual assets to that project and because the overall project is very large and long

Length: The way we break up projects, they vary between a day and six months.

Tasks within projects: This also varies a lot. Sometimes 1 to upwards of 10,000.

Resource allocation: I'm assuming you mean people working on the project (as opposed to resources used to accomplish a project.) 1-10.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Forrest
Resource allocation: I'm assuming you mean people working on the project (as opposed to resources used to accomplish a project.) 1-10.
I guess both number of people who all need to communicate about the plan and number of resource items listed in your project ("Bob Smith" or "pounds of cement" could be single entries) could be valuable numbers.
 
Projects: 1 - 5 at the same time, very variable in size.

Length: From two weeks up to two years, where the long distance projects often be splitted in some small ones.

Taks within project: Hm, hard to say, could be like Lizard wrote before. But always more than one.

Resource allocation: 2 - 30 employees, rooms and all the things for the workshops. Sometimes there are external consultants.
 
200 to 300 projects.

Tasks can be 5 to 50. We have some projects that are up to a year, most are 1 to 2 months.
 
Average # of Projects : 5
Average Number of Tasks: 200
Duration: 6- 18 months
Resources: 4-10
 
Personally I don't typically have more than 1-2 projects going simultaneously and they can span anywhere from 4 weeks to about 4 months and have 3-5 resources. The real project managers in our consultancy will have 4-5 projects going, again from about 4 weeks but up to maybe 6 months (though the majority are shorter), and have up to perhaps 20 resources. Smaller projects have as few as 20 tasks (I prefer to call them activities, less top-down feeling) while larger ones could be 2-3x that. But our business is very fluid (design consultancy) and each person is pretty autonomous and the work is non-routine, so doing micro schedules is not very worthwhile. So activities tend to cover pretty broad chunks of work with distinct milestones and deliverables at the end.

I think Omni Group needs to decide what it wants to take on as a first step with this app: competing with MS Project at running the building of the Boeing Dreamliner, or if it wants to tackle the myriad of projects that are far, far smaller. Personally I think there's a huge opportunity there, as something like 37 Signals Basecamp has shown in its domain. (I read somewhere that this is there focus, but it could perhaps be more explicit, help set expectations more.) The needs are much simpler, and in many cases even things like interoperability with MS Project are not that critical which would be deal breakers in much larger organizations. The tools and capabilities required for running a 2-4 month project with a handful-size team are easier to wrangle than for a 1-2 year project with hundreds of people working on it.

We can see already from the broad variety of responses to the Beta that there are very divergent needs for a project planning app, as there are a very wide variety of project types. It can quickly turn into a slippery slope of feature creep, which is how MS Project ended up where it is. I'd prefer to see something lean and mean at first, even if it means not satisfying the needs of the customers with the biggest projects if it risks alienating those with simpler needs (as MSP does). Personally I want something that will save me from having to hack this together in Excel or Graffle, and be quick and fluid and not make me put in too much detail which I'll just spend valuable time constantly changing.

My .02c

Adam
 
I think I see what's really needed here ... OmniPlan and OmniPlan Professional. It's obvious that no two OmniPlan users have the same needs ... except for OmniPlan, that is ;)

I can be working on multiple projects for multiple clients, ranging from a handful of resources to dozens. Some projects require painful amounts of detail, and others just turn out to be 'ToDo' lists with due dates.

Some have dragged on for over a year, while others come and go within weeks. And it's not uncommon for a large project to be broken down into several small projects, since clients change their minds so often that their needs no longer require all segments of what started out as a large project.


James B
 
 


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