[Jason Mark]

We have 8 people (plus some freelancers) and have about 10-14 open projects at a time. We think in terms of hours (i.e. Rob has 7 hours total for this task, spread out evenly over 3 weeks). In order to make this work in OmniPlan I need to check off every task by hand to make it effort based, and then guess at the percent until it right (5.75) tells me it’s 7 hours.

Many of the features below exist in other software such as Merlin2, but combined with the lack of sharing of resources across projects, these would make day-to-day use of OmniPlan cumbersome for my staff...

Feature Request 1: Have a global pref to make all new tasks “Effort” based by default, instead of “Duration” based.
Feature Request 2: When a task is “Effort” based, if a user enters hours into the “effort” Field, do NOT change the “duration”.
Feature Request 3: When entering “assigned amount” (i.e. 100% of 100% (whatever that means)), allow users to enter time (i.e. 5h). Every time I've asked a programer "what percent are you done with that", they just blink at me, but if I say "how many more hours to get to this milestone" they can give me a number.
Feature Request 4: When showing how far completed a task is, show it based on “Effort” not “Duration”.
Feature Request 5: Allow the “Effort” to be edited, and shown as hours, instead of percents.
Feature Request 6: Provide the ability to always show “Effort” as h and the “Duration” as h/d/w/m

Thanks,

Jason

www.gravityswitch.com

[Lizard]

Some of these are definitely things we are thinking about, like customizing the default properties of a task. These sound like good ideas where OmniPlan could go in the future, but right now we're currently kinda tied to the gantt chart. How do you map effort onto a gantt chart? If Bob has 8 hours of effort for "Make Widgets", I know how long the bubble should be, but where (left-to-right) do I draw it on the chart? I can't put dates across the top of the chart. I suppose you could align the left ends of all tasks.

Seriously, what do you have in mind?

[Jason Mark]

Originally Posted by Lizard

Some of these are definitely things we are thinking about, like customizing the default properties of a task. These sound like good ideas where OmniPlan could go in the future, but right now we're currently kinda tied to the gantt chart. How do you map effort onto a gantt chart? If Bob has 8 hours of effort for "Make Widgets", I know how long the bubble should be, but where (left-to-right) do I draw it on the chart? I can't put dates across the top of the chart. I suppose you could align the left ends of all tasks.

I understand. Yeah, I think aligned to the left ends of the tasks would be the way to show it. It does sort of mix the metaphor though doesn't it?

Another option might be to ignore the "completion bar" and instead just color code them (green = done, yellow = mostly done, red = all others, grey = upcoming)

One other option is just to have an extra field which is "Effort remaining" and just show it on the right-hand side of the bar. That's the simplest and "just works", although not as visually easy to read. You should send it by your UI wizards. I'm always amazed at how well you guys present information, maybe they'll have an idea.

[Ken Case]

It sounds like you could get a lot of mileage out of the current "fixed effort" mode if you were simply able to edit the completeness of a task by entering the effort remaining rather than a percentage. Would that help?

[eeverman@usgs.gov]

This is similar our situation - we work in hours and percentage doesn't mean anything. I need to assign Bob for 20 hours on Task A, but I've no idea what percentage that might be. If I change the effort required to complete Task A, I can't have Bob's time changed as he is assigned to other projects. I guess that introduces a new constraint: At what point during the duration of the project is Bob's time needed... perhaps beginning, middle, or end options??