I'm trying to use OmniPlan to manage a project and there's one point that has me fairly confused. When I look at the list of things to do for the project and the people who will be doing them, its not clear to me how to define the effort / duration needed for a task vs the actual calendar time that it'll take.

The project itself is to replace the company's phone switch. To do that, we'll define the requirements for the new switch, review them, obtain some quotes from vendors, review the quotes, select the winner and install the new switch. The part that makes my head go sideways is trying to define how certain tasks get done. For instance to review the requirements, I need to have the director of operations and the executive director spend around an hour or so going through them. However, this isn't the only thing that they're working on. I'll be able to spend some time with them next Wednesday to go through this task. So how to I model it in OmniPlan?

I know what their effort will be for this task, at least I'm around 90% confident of their effort. But I know that their effort in this will be on a part time basis. I may have the requirements finished by Friday but they're not available till next week. So there's a difference between the effort /duration needed for their effort and the actual calendar time that needed for the task. Its not clear to me how to show this in OnmiPlan.

Any help and insight would be appreciated.

Thanks.

- Peter