[mija77]

Hi,

I’m new to Omniplan, so please bear with me. I’ve created a dummy project with only one resource (me), available 100%. I have defined normal hours for the project as well as off and extra hours for the resource.

I then entered tasks and dependencies and „effort“ for every task. Naturally, „effort“ and „duration“ are the same as long as a task is not assigned to a resource.

But as I assign all tasks to the resource (which is available 100% mind you), some tasks show a duration that is smaller than the effort. I don’t get it. If there was more than one resource working on the same task, alright, duration would be smaller than effort. If I had entered 200% efficiency for the one resource, that would explain it. But I haven’t.

So my question is this: Which parameter do I have to tweak in order to keep the effort for every task as it was, but have Omniplan adjust duration so that it either stays the same as the effort, or, which should be the case most of the time, calculate durations longer than the respective effort?

Thank you,
-Michael

[Tom Bunch]

Duration is expressed in terms of the project schedule, always. The help entry on "duration versus effort" explains this but doesn't really clarify why.

The project hours define what hours of the day you normally wish to consider when doing your planning. You can of course have resources come in outside the normal hours, but this period of time doesn't show up on the Gantt chart (unless you turn on View -> Gantt -> Off-hours), and the duration displayed does not account for the time outside of the project schedule. Cost values, of course, do. If you'd like to see this time go by, you should make the project schedule a superset of the resource schedules.

To conveniently give the project a 24/7 schedule while giving your resources a "normal" schedule of 8-12, 1-5, consider putting all your resources into a single resource group and setting up the normal schedule on that group.

You may run into the traditional point of confusion regarding unit conversion factors. Regardless of how many hours of work get done per day in a given schedule, 8 hours is going to be displayed as 1d in duration and effort unless you choose otherwise. This is configured in the Project: Unit Conversions inspector. If you have "Resource 1" come in and work 2 hours of overtime today, they will produce 1d 2h of effort in a single calendar day. It may be clearer if you turn of the display of anything greater than "hours" in the Project: Formats inspector.

-Tom