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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?
 
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.
 
Quote:
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.
 
Quote:
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.
 
OK, now I understand. Thanks for pointing this out.
 
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.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
Ok, thanks, I think I understand now what is supposed to be happening and why.

However, it seems that for rough sketching of tasks, assignments and scheduling (like I'm doing right now), it'd be really useful to sketch out tasks whose duration never changes regardless of how many hrs/wk the employee assigned works. I'd like to be able to do that and then gradually as I get further along in the planning process, task-by-task, start taking people's work schedules into account and adjust accordingly. What I've had to do to accomplish this is set everyone's work week to 40 hrs/wk and then all at once have to change everyone's hours and their tasks back to "reality." Maybe my planning has to be more precise to begin with, but with software development and deployment (more or less the nature of my project), time seems to be very "fuzzy"... what do you think?
 
One more thought: What about ongoing tasks? Say a recursive task that needs happen 4 hrs/week for 12 weeks? This "background" work affects a staff member's workload, but if I set it to 48 hrs of effort (or duration), a 40 hr/week staff member get's it done in a little more than a week and if I set it to 12 weeks, it thinks that the staff member is overloaded if I give them anything else to do... I supose I could make it work by carefully calculating the percentages of "amount assigned" that would force the appropriate scaling of this assignment, but Omniplan only shows percentages rounded to one percent, which works fine with 4/40= 10%, but not 1/40 = 2.5%, not to mention the ugly numbers you're dealling with if your staff actually works something like 37.5 hrs/wk.
 
 


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