[mcroasmun]

Track by effort/duration seems to be broken in the new beta. No matter how I set the "track by" info for a task, the task is tracked by effort. Any help?

[Lizard]

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're seeing. In my (admittedly simple) check just now, it seems to be working properly.
The field with the dark people icon next to it is the one that will change when the assigned resources change.
So if effort varies with resources assigned, then adding a second resource to an eight hour task will make the effort 16h while keeping the duration at 8h.

But if duration varies with resources assigned, then adding a second resource to an eight hour task will make the duration 4h while keeping the effort at 8h.

Let me know if you're still seeing the issue and maybe more specifics about how you're getting there.

[mcroasmun]

Originally Posted by Lizard

I'm not quite sure I understand what you're seeing. In my (admittedly simple) check just now, it seems to be working properly.
The field with the dark people icon next to it is the one that will change when the assigned resources change.
So if effort varies with resources assigned, then adding a second resource to an eight hour task will make the effort 16h while keeping the duration at 8h.

But if duration varies with resources assigned, then adding a second resource to an eight hour task will make the duration 4h while keeping the effort at 8h.

Let me know if you're still seeing the issue and maybe more specifics about how you're getting there.

This is the behavior I expect, but instead I find that changing resources assigned changes the duration against a fixed effort value, regardless of which icon is darkened. Is that not what you get? I find this behavior even in a brand new document.

[mcroasmun]

Originally Posted by mcroasmun

This is the behavior I expect, but instead I find that changing resources assigned changes the duration against a fixed effort value, regardless of which icon is darkened. Is that not what you get? I find this behavior even in a brand new document.

This is precisely the experiment I performed:
1) Open a new project and create a task and set it to "track task by duration."
2) Create a new resource who works 20 hrs/wk
3) Assign the resource to the task and observe that effort remains 1w but duration increases to 2w. This should not be.

[Lizard]

OK, now I understand. Thanks for pointing this out.

[Lizard]

OK. I talked this over with someone else here to make sure we were thinking this through properly. The behavior you're seeing is correct.

1) The tooltips on those buttons are not very accurate. That's probably contributing to the confusion.

2) [the main point] 1 day in OmniPlan is not one day like Monday is one day. 1 day in OmniPlan is 8 working hours (or whatever you've set in the Project: Formatting inspector). When you say a task is 1 week long, you're really saying it's 40 hours long. (We just allow it to display as 1 week so you don't have to see tasks taking 1600 hours and try to figure out whether that'll finish this quarter or not.) So if a full-time resource starts the task Monday morning, they'll finish it Friday afternoon. But if a half-time resource starts it Monday morning, by Friday afternoon they will have only worked on the task for 20 hours.

3) The effort/duration switch is intended to distinguish between two types of tasks: (1) Meetings, training sessions, etc. where no matter how many people attend, the duration is approximately the same and (2) Tasks which can be easily divided so that two people sharing the work will finish in roughly half the time.