[bonka]

I have several project members in a project. One of them, lets call him [R1] is travelling for five days, and I have declared these days as off hours. All the other resources in the project are avaliable 100% of the time.

I have assigned two resources, our traveller [R1] and a trusty worker [R2] to a task. The task are dependent on them both, working in a team. Let's call them client and director for now.

Before assigning the task to either of them, the GANTT is in clear violation to our travellers avaliability, but when assigning the task to [R1], it swiftly swushes to the day after our friend returns home. Thats great! Let's just add [R2], and we're off! … But when assigning our trusty worker [R2] to the mix, the task pops back in time, clearly overriding [R1]s availiability. And that sucks, because he is out of town.

I do understand the program. It looks at the avaliable resources and thinks "It doesn't matter if [R1] is off hours; [R2] is assigned to the same task! Super cool! Don't stop the press!"

But what if the task is dependent on two resources being avaliable at the same time? Or three, or four persons in a boolean AND relationship?

(Leveling the plan doesn't help. I need do deallocate the avaliable resource if not doing it manually.)

Any help? Or is it a feature request?

[joelr]

Hi! For the moment, OmniPlan schedules tasks according to the availability of any of the resources involved.

We are aware that this could be better (to be able to say "ALL of these resources"), and I have filed your post as a feature request. We would need to figure out the best way to offer this option in the UI, tweak a couple of things and test it.

We would love to hear your ideas about what you would like the setup process to look like. In the mean time, you may need to add some constraints to the affected task(s) to make them happen at the right time.

[bonka]

Thanks for a quick reply.

I have in the meantime somehow gotten it working with constraints.

In my world, dependencies, even in the HR department are quite unelastic. A director always relies on a client, a photographer (almost) always relies on a director. (What's nice about this is that these kind of relationships also gives a pretty good clue about effort vs duration.

A one day shoot does not go any faster with ten people on the set etc, an editing process doesn't go any faster with the editor and director present, but both color correction and FX are independent of this (and rely on gantt charts more than resource dependencies). But that's on the border of the discussion. :)

There surely are exceptions from this rule, but for me - a simple hierachy with flat or top nodes with some smart logic attached to it would seem like a good idea. This could also make the groups more versatile. Is the group an OR dependency or AND? A.K.A. Elastic or unelastic?

So with - say 10 resources - you could intuitively create several groups of dependency, both interally and externally "Development", "Managment", and "Sales" as a combination of the two - for example.

Oh well. It's late. But that's the top of my head right now. Good luck and good night.

[joelr]

Thanks for your additional comments. I added them to the feature request, and we will definitely take them into consideration.

I'm glad you got it working with the constraints. If you have any more questions or feedback, post away! (or you can email us via Help > Send Feedback).