[jbkendrick]

I am an OmniFocus and OmniOutliner user and love Omni products. I am looking for a way to graph a high level view for planning resource allocation for my projects. While our PMO uses MS Project for major projects, I deal with smaller projects and since Project is not required, I prefer to stay away from its complexities.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a tool that would graph something like the below example, showing projects and the resources I have assigned to those projects over a period of time. My goal is to get a better handle on resource allocation so I don't over allocate, which I have a tendency to do. I really don't intend to create a WBS or identify individual tasks, though I might break down by project phase, so I'm not sure that OmniPlan would provide the desired graph, especially since I want to see resource allocation across many projects.

Thanks for any recommendation or suggestion you can provide. John

5/09 6/09 7/09
Project 1 --------------------------------------------------------
***************************

Project 2 --------------------------------------
*******************************

[skwirl]

You could use OmniPlan to lay out the project and resource assignments for all of your projects in one OmniPlan project file, then jump into the Resource View to see the workload of all of your resources.

To put all of your projects and their subtasks in one OmniPlan file you can create a group for each project, then list all the tasks as sub-tasks. This will allow you to share the same resource pool over all the projects.

[jbkendrick]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I've downloaded OmniPlan and will give it a whirl. Your plan sounds like just what I was looking for. John