There are two phases to project management with OmniPlan. The first is setting up your project; adding tasks, assigning resources, setting due dates, and such. That part of project management is covered in this chapter’s tutorial. The second phase is Managing a Project with OmniPlan’s tools.
Topics covered in the tutorial include:
Project management software for professionals that helps people plan complex projects. Includes a free 14-day trial. OmniPlan 3 Standalone. All Software Adobe Autodesk Chaosgroup V-Ray BIM 360 is a unified platform connecting your project teams and data in real-time, from design through construction, supporting informed dec.
This tutorial takes you through the process of laying out an entire project—from start to finish—in OmniPlan. Along the way, you’ll use the inspectors and various tools to quickly create a project plan. Even if you have used previous versions of OmniPlan, we encourage you to work through the tutorial as a way of familiarizing yourself with OmniPlan’s interface.
For the purpose of this tutorial we’ll be looking at the development process of a game being put together by an independent team of intrepid designers, coders, and testers. The project design described as we proceed is loosely based on a software development cycle, but applies just as well to any complex work consisting of interdependent and occasionally concurrent phases.
Starting off in On My [device], tap in the toolbar to create a New Project:
If this is your first time running OmniPlan, the Project Editor opens with the Dark Theme applied:
If you would like to switch from the Dark Theme to the Light Theme (which will be used for the remainder of this tutorial), tap in the toolbar to open the View menu. At the bottom of the View menu, tap Light Theme:
After switching to the Light Theme, OmniPlan should look as follows:
Keep the Dark Theme in mind for those times when you’re working late and want to take advantage of the darker background.
The Project Editor displays the Gantt Chart by default; you can switch over to the Network View by tapping in the toolbar. To switch back to the Gantt Chart, tap .
As you can see, your first task awaits editing. Before you get to that, though, the next order of business is to give your project a proper name; something that better reflects the project at hand.
Tap in the toolbar, and then tap the Project tab to open the Project inspector so you can edit the project title. Tap where it says My Project, press the backspace key to erase that title, and then enter The Game Plan as the new project name for this tutorial.
When setting out to build a project, one of the most important aspects is the timeframe. This, in turn, is dictated by any deadlines or start constraints that exist for the project.
Design and building the game project doesn’t have a hard deadline for completion; it just needs to be done when it’s ready. To indicate this, go to the Project inspector, tap the Start field, and then tap the today button to use today’s date as the start date.
If you are working through this tutorial, your project’s start date will obviously be different from the dates reflected in the text and screenshots that follow.
When planning a project, all of your dates will be in the future. As a suggestion, perhaps pick a date a few weeks in the future as your project’s start date for the tutorial.
Conveniently, the day you initially create a new project is used as the default setting for starting the project. If you need to set the Start date to something else, you can certainly do that.
After setting the Start date, you’ll notice a couple things:
With the Start date for the project set, it’s time to return to the Gantt chart, where the first default task awaits details.
Tasks in OmniPlan represent discrete pieces of work that require substantial effort to complete, usually across a duration expressed in hours or days, rather than minutes. Prepare morning coffee, for example, is a task that’s typically not within the scope of OmniPlan, while Install espresso machine very well could be—maybe even a group of tasks, if you need external help getting pipes or electricity connected.
The notion of “task” in OmniPlan is in contrast with action item-based productivity apps such as OmniPlan’s counterpart OmniFocus, where anything you can conceive of as something you’d like to accomplish can—and should—be included in thinking about your project plans.
OmniFocus is built around personal task execution; the granularity of OmniPlan’s tasks is intended for work that must be considered by (or requires input from) a group of stakeholders, often as a team.
The process of project building starts with a brainstorm session for all the tasks that the project should include. As noted, these are typically things that take the effort of multiple people to complete, or have some impact on other work that the project requires. Don’t worry too much about whether a task fits the project’s scope at this point—it’s more important to get the ideas flowing. You can always come back and edit these later.
Start by changing the name of the default task:
You could also edit the Name field in the Task inspector:
To add more tasks to the project, tap in the toolbar. Create the following tasks:
New tasks appear beneath the currently selected item in the Gantt chart, or at the bottom of the list if no tasks, milestones, or groups are selected.
As you may notice while entering the tasks, the project now has more tasks than can comfortably fit in a single screen. However, you can use the pinch gesture to zoom out on the Gantt chart so everything fits within the window.
Initial task entry can be greatly sped up with the aid of a connected or paired keyboard. After entering the name for a task, pressing Return twice accepts the name of the task and creates the next one.
When tasks are closely related or interdependent it can be useful to put them in a group. Groups help organize a project conceptually, and also act as meta-tasks that can be linked via dependencies to other tasks or groups.
A task group is just a container—it has no duration or effort of its own. The amount of time and energy needed to complete the group is equal to the sum of the requirements of the group’s individual tasks.
An easy way to gather tasks into a group is in Edit Mode. Tap Edit in the toolbar, and then tap to select all of the tasks and milestones that you want to group together:
Admittedly, Group 1 is a boring name for a group. And while you could name it anything you’d like, a suitable choice may already be there. In looking at the list of grouped tasks, the first one--Create Initial Design—appears as the front-runner as group leader, so let’s make that change:
As you may have noticed, the Create Initial Design group is actually a subgroup of Group 1. Since there’s no need for this to be a subgroup, let’s remove Group 1 so that Create Initial Design stands on its own:
With the initial group established, let’s set these tasks apart from the others by changing their bar color:
Using the methods you’ve learned in Step 4, create three additional groups as follows:
Don’t do anything with Project Pitch, Combine Art and Code, Release Candidate 1 (RC1), or Game Release; those will get some special attention later on.
After you have created those groupings, your project should look similar to the following (your color choices may vary):
Milestones are used in project management to denote specific events of importance. A milestone can be a specific event, such as giving a client presentation, and are often used as checkpoints along the project timeline.
There are two ways to get milestones into your project: you can insert a new milestone between existing tasks, or you can convert an existing task into a milestone. Let’s look at the former option first.
To insert a milestone in a project, do the following:
You can also convert an existing task into a milestone, similar to how you earlier converted the Create Initial Design task into a group. There are two tasks that weren’t placed into groups earlier that are perfectly suited for turning into milestones, so let’s do that:
When you convert a task to a milestone, you’ll see that its Effort and Duration fields in the Task inspector have been set to 0h. Unlike the tasks assigned to a milestone, milestones themselves don’t take any time to complete—they are the culmination of the work that went into hitting that milestone.
Step 6: Setting Task Durations
With the tasks grouped and milestones set, you can now focus on detailing the amount of time required to accomplish each task.
When you initially entered the tasks for The Game Plan project, the Duration of each task was set to 1d, or one day. As with any project, some tasks will take less time than others, and some could span days or weeks depending on their complexity.
When you enter task durations, a special Duration Keyboard appears. This keyboard facilitates date and duration entry, so let’s take a moment to examine the keyboard before you embark on entering durations for all of the tasks.
Using the Duration Keyboard
When entering the duration in the Task inspector, you’ll notice that tapping the duration value brings up a special Duration Keyboard, with a row of buttons for selecting the following duration types:
To use the number pad, do the following:
If a task, such as the Refine Game Concepts task, has a mixed duration (1w 3d), do the following:
Use whichever method you prefer to extend the durations of the project’s tasks. However, please do give each a try, since there are huge benefits to using the numerical pad to enter a duration.
Enter Task Durations
Now that you know how to use the Duration Keyboard, let’s start by setting the duration of the Brainstorm Gameplay task to two days, rather than the default of one day:
Using either the drag method, or the Task inspector, set the Duration for the remaining tasks as follows:
After you have finished setting the durations, your project should look similar to the following:
Step 7: Connecting Tasks with Dependency Lines
With the durations set for all of the tasks, one thing becomes exceptionally clear: your team cannot complete all of the tasks if they start at the same time. Even if you had all of the resources to do so, some parts of the project can’t even begin until others have been completed.
Thankfully, all of the pieces are now in place to establish task dependencies. There are four ways that dependencies can exist:
To set up a dependency between two tasks, do the following:
Dragging the dependency arrow from the completion of one task to the beginning of another creates a Finish-Start dependency.
While in Edit mode, you can use the Connect/Disconnect button to add Finish-Start dependencies or remove dependencies between any number of selected tasks simultaneously.
Now, set up the remaining task dependencies as follows:
Once all of the connections are made, your project should look similar to the following:
As you can see, the project is really starting to take shape. However, as the project manager, it’s not quite time to assign resources to the tasks. The next few steps take care of a little bit of project housekeeping.
Step 8: Creating Hammock Tasks
In the life of a project, there are certain tasks whose duration is dependent on both when the previous task ends and when the next task can start. These tasks, known as Hammock Tasks, are useful when your project faces a hard deadline.
Hammock tasks can help you decide which tasks can be compressed if the project is running behind schedule, or if there are any external factors that influence when parts of the project must happen.
Now that all of the tasks in The Game Plan project have their dependencies set, you can see (roughly) how long the project should take to hit the final milestone, Game Release. As it just so happens, the Game Release milestone falls a few weeks short of a major gaming conference, which gives the project a hard deadline for completion.
In reviewing the other parts of the project, the one task that seems the most flexible for converting into a Hammock task is the Public Beta. If additional time is needed for squashing bugs, the team can use some of the Public Beta time to do that work, while still ensuring the project releases on schedule.
In Step 7, the Game Release task received a Finish-to-Start prerequisite from the Public Beta task. However, the Game Release milestone needs to start when the Public Beta finishes. So, the first order of business is to remove the prerequisite from the Game Release task:
Depending on where you set the Start at earliest date for the Game Release milestone, the Public Beta Hammock task should stretch a bit to fill in the space between the 'Friends and Family' Beta task and the Game Release milestone.
Step 9: Editing the Work Week
One thing that you may need to do as a project manager is to define the work week. For example, the typical 40-hour work week is Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, with an hour of unpaid lunch somewhere in between.
To define the work week for your company/project:
Even the most accommodating work week will occasionally have days that are out of the ordinary. Whether it’s a national holiday, a team-wide training seminar, an industry expo or conference, or just a patch of bad weather that keeps folks out of the office, setting exceptions to the regular work schedule can be key to keeping a project on track.
In looking at the calendar, there are three holidays that fall during this particular project’s duration (Labor Day, Halloween, and U.S. Thanksgiving) that need to be factored into the schedule.
If you are working through this tutorial, the holidays you encounter will most assuredly be different than the ones noted here. The takeaway from this example, however, is to show the importance of how holidays and observances can affect a project’s timeline.
When setting up your own projects, be sure to examine the calendar for holidays, observances, and any other special events that could impact normal working hours.
To view and edit the project calendar, do the following:
Step 11: Creating Resources
Now it’s time to start adding the team members, equipment, and materials necessary to bring the project to fruition. Every person, piece of infrastructure, and raw ingredient that contributes to reaching the project’s goal is counted as a resource.
You can remove or rearrange resources at any time by tapping Edit at the bottom of the Resources inspector.
Drag on the handle at the right edge of a resource to move it up or down in the list, or tap the delete button at left to remove a resource. Tap Done when you’re finished rearranging or pruning the resources.
Now that you’ve added the resources necessary for The Game Plan, the next logical thing to do is assign those resources to the tasks.
To assign resources, tap to select the first task in the project (Brainstorm Gameplay), open the Task inspector, and then tap the Assignments tab:
However, before diving into making the assignments, let’s first examine the top part of the Assignments tab:
This section of the Assignments tab gives you the ability to adjust the behavior of tasks when resources are assigned, how tasks are treated for scheduling, and which tasks receive priority over others when leveling your project. The task Assignment behaviors include:
Now that you know how to adjust a task’s behavior, let’s return to the Brainstorm Gameplay task. This particular task requires everyone’s effort, where the team meets in the Conference Room of Extraordinary Size to whiteboard and hash out ideas.
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In the Assignments tab, do the following:
When finished, here’s how the Assignments tab for the Brainstorm Gameplay task should appear:
Using similar methods, use the information in the following table to set task behaviors and assign resources:
When you’ve finished assigning everyone to the project, it should look similar to the following:
Step 13: Setting Individual Schedule Exceptions
Individual staff members may have personalized work schedules, and they’ll almost certainly have individual needs for time off over the course of a project.
To display an employee’s normal schedule:
Once a project gets started, tracking costs and expenses is a critical part of your role as project manager. As part of setting up the project and determining how much it will cost, you can assign costs to every resource used or acquired during the course of the project, including Staff, Equipment, and Materials.
Resources can be assigned both Cost per Hour and/or a Cost per Use in the Resources inspector. Miscellaneous costs not associated with a specific resource can instead be added to the task itself, as Task Cost in the Task inspector.
To get an idea of how much this project will cost, start by assigning an hourly rate to the team members:
To see the overall cost of the project, tap to select the Project inspector and look at the Total Cost field. Knowing this in advance helps you to plan for additional costs, or it could force you to go back and reallocate resources if the project is over budget.
The Total Cost of the project, however, isn’t entirely accurate right now. This is because the Public Beta has been set up as a Hammock Task, which allows it to shrink or grow as the project progresses. You’ll want to keep a close eye on the Total Cost, as it will most certainly go down, as the duration of the Hammock Task shortens.
Step 15: Leveling the Project
After assigning team members and equipment to the tasks, you can ensure the team is at its most productive by Leveling the workload across resources and tasks.
It’s hard to overstate the power of leveling in OmniPlan. When you first level a project, you cross the line between human and machine—making the statement that you’ve added everything you know about the project to the plan, and now it’s time to see what OmniPlan can do to help get all those things done optimally. Automation happens, and everything moves to its most efficient place based on the model of the project you’ve described.
To level the resource workload for your project, do the following:
Unless your staff is already in the optimal configuration you’ll see the tasks in the Gantt view shift to accommodate the most efficient use of their time.
If you tap on the Project inspector, you’ll notice that the Total Cost has already gone down slightly due to shrinkage in the Public Beta hammock task.
With tasks set and resources assigned and leveled, the project now reflects the best of all possible worlds—one where unforeseen hindrances don’t bog down progress. A world where optimistic estimates rule the day.
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This is the world that is captured when a Baseline for progress is set. The Baseline is used to compare the project’s initial expectations against how the project is actually progressing. Setting the Baseline is important because, as the project manager, it enables you to adjust milestones and resource allocations to complete the project on time.
To set a Baseline, do the following:
Your project can have more than one Baseline; simply add another by tapping Set Baseline at the bottom of the View menu. This allows you to compare how the project is progressing compared to the original timeline or against subsequent baselines.
What Comes Next?
The Game Plan project is now in its ideal form, right before the real work begins.
By laying out the project in OmniPlan, you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect. All of the tasks are in place, resources are assigned, you’ve set up the baseline, and you know how much all of this is going to cost. Well done!
Now comes the fun part of updating and managing the project along the way. The next chapter, Managing a Project, shows you how to use a variety of tools to see your project through to completion.
Topics covered in the tutorial include:
This tutorial takes you through the process of laying out an entire project—from start to finish—in OmniPlan. Along the way, you’ll use the inspectors and various tools to quickly create a project plan. Even if you have used previous versions of OmniPlan, we encourage you to work through the tutorial as a way of familiarizing yourself with OmniPlan’s interface.
For the purpose of this tutorial we’ll be looking at the development process of a game being put together by an independent team of intrepid designers, coders, and testers. The project design described as we proceed is loosely based on a software development cycle, but applies just as well to any complex work consisting of interdependent and occasionally concurrent phases.
Starting off in On My [device], tap in the toolbar to create a New Project:
If this is your first time running OmniPlan, the Project Editor opens with the Dark Theme applied:
If you would like to switch from the Dark Theme to the Light Theme (which will be used for the remainder of this tutorial), tap in the toolbar to open the View menu. At the bottom of the View menu, tap Light Theme:
After switching to the Light Theme, OmniPlan should look as follows:
Keep the Dark Theme in mind for those times when you’re working late and want to take advantage of the darker background.
The Project Editor displays the Gantt Chart by default; you can switch over to the Network View by tapping in the toolbar. To switch back to the Gantt Chart, tap .
As you can see, your first task awaits editing. Before you get to that, though, the next order of business is to give your project a proper name; something that better reflects the project at hand.
Tap in the toolbar, and then tap the Project tab to open the Project inspector so you can edit the project title. Tap where it says My Project, press the backspace key to erase that title, and then enter The Game Plan as the new project name for this tutorial.
When setting out to build a project, one of the most important aspects is the timeframe. This, in turn, is dictated by any deadlines or start constraints that exist for the project.
Design and building the game project doesn’t have a hard deadline for completion; it just needs to be done when it’s ready. To indicate this, go to the Project inspector, tap the Start field, and then tap the today button to use today’s date as the start date.
If you are working through this tutorial, your project’s start date will obviously be different from the dates reflected in the text and screenshots that follow.
When planning a project, all of your dates will be in the future. As a suggestion, perhaps pick a date a few weeks in the future as your project’s start date for the tutorial.
Conveniently, the day you initially create a new project is used as the default setting for starting the project. If you need to set the Start date to something else, you can certainly do that.
After setting the Start date, you’ll notice a couple things:
With the Start date for the project set, it’s time to return to the Gantt chart, where the first default task awaits details.
Tasks in OmniPlan represent discrete pieces of work that require substantial effort to complete, usually across a duration expressed in hours or days, rather than minutes. Prepare morning coffee, for example, is a task that’s typically not within the scope of OmniPlan, while Install espresso machine very well could be—maybe even a group of tasks, if you need external help getting pipes or electricity connected.
The notion of “task” in OmniPlan is in contrast with action item-based productivity apps such as OmniPlan’s counterpart OmniFocus, where anything you can conceive of as something you’d like to accomplish can—and should—be included in thinking about your project plans.
OmniFocus is built around personal task execution; the granularity of OmniPlan’s tasks is intended for work that must be considered by (or requires input from) a group of stakeholders, often as a team.
The process of project building starts with a brainstorm session for all the tasks that the project should include. As noted, these are typically things that take the effort of multiple people to complete, or have some impact on other work that the project requires. Don’t worry too much about whether a task fits the project’s scope at this point—it’s more important to get the ideas flowing. You can always come back and edit these later.
Start by changing the name of the default task:
You could also edit the Name field in the Task inspector:
To add more tasks to the project, tap in the toolbar. Create the following tasks:
New tasks appear beneath the currently selected item in the Gantt chart, or at the bottom of the list if no tasks, milestones, or groups are selected.
As you may notice while entering the tasks, the project now has more tasks than can comfortably fit in a single screen. However, you can use the pinch gesture to zoom out on the Gantt chart so everything fits within the window.
Initial task entry can be greatly sped up with the aid of a connected or paired keyboard. After entering the name for a task, pressing Return twice accepts the name of the task and creates the next one.
When tasks are closely related or interdependent it can be useful to put them in a group. Groups help organize a project conceptually, and also act as meta-tasks that can be linked via dependencies to other tasks or groups.
A task group is just a container—it has no duration or effort of its own. The amount of time and energy needed to complete the group is equal to the sum of the requirements of the group’s individual tasks.
An easy way to gather tasks into a group is in Edit Mode. Tap Edit in the toolbar, and then tap to select all of the tasks and milestones that you want to group together:
Admittedly, Group 1 is a boring name for a group. And while you could name it anything you’d like, a suitable choice may already be there. In looking at the list of grouped tasks, the first one--Create Initial Design—appears as the front-runner as group leader, so let’s make that change:
As you may have noticed, the Create Initial Design group is actually a subgroup of Group 1. Since there’s no need for this to be a subgroup, let’s remove Group 1 so that Create Initial Design stands on its own:
With the initial group established, let’s set these tasks apart from the others by changing their bar color:
Using the methods you’ve learned in Step 4, create three additional groups as follows:
Don’t do anything with Project Pitch, Combine Art and Code, Release Candidate 1 (RC1), or Game Release; those will get some special attention later on.
After you have created those groupings, your project should look similar to the following (your color choices may vary):
Milestones are used in project management to denote specific events of importance. A milestone can be a specific event, such as giving a client presentation, and are often used as checkpoints along the project timeline.
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There are two ways to get milestones into your project: you can insert a new milestone between existing tasks, or you can convert an existing task into a milestone. Let’s look at the former option first.
To insert a milestone in a project, do the following:
You can also convert an existing task into a milestone, similar to how you earlier converted the Create Initial Design task into a group. There are two tasks that weren’t placed into groups earlier that are perfectly suited for turning into milestones, so let’s do that:
When you convert a task to a milestone, you’ll see that its Effort and Duration fields in the Task inspector have been set to 0h. Unlike the tasks assigned to a milestone, milestones themselves don’t take any time to complete—they are the culmination of the work that went into hitting that milestone.
Step 6: Setting Task Durations
With the tasks grouped and milestones set, you can now focus on detailing the amount of time required to accomplish each task.
When you initially entered the tasks for The Game Plan project, the Duration of each task was set to 1d, or one day. As with any project, some tasks will take less time than others, and some could span days or weeks depending on their complexity.
When you enter task durations, a special Duration Keyboard appears. This keyboard facilitates date and duration entry, so let’s take a moment to examine the keyboard before you embark on entering durations for all of the tasks.
Using the Duration Keyboard
When entering the duration in the Task inspector, you’ll notice that tapping the duration value brings up a special Duration Keyboard, with a row of buttons for selecting the following duration types:
To use the number pad, do the following:
If a task, such as the Refine Game Concepts task, has a mixed duration (1w 3d), do the following:
Use whichever method you prefer to extend the durations of the project’s tasks. However, please do give each a try, since there are huge benefits to using the numerical pad to enter a duration.
Enter Task Durations
Now that you know how to use the Duration Keyboard, let’s start by setting the duration of the Brainstorm Gameplay task to two days, rather than the default of one day:
Using either the drag method, or the Task inspector, set the Duration for the remaining tasks as follows:
After you have finished setting the durations, your project should look similar to the following:
Step 7: Connecting Tasks with Dependency Lines
With the durations set for all of the tasks, one thing becomes exceptionally clear: your team cannot complete all of the tasks if they start at the same time. Even if you had all of the resources to do so, some parts of the project can’t even begin until others have been completed.
Thankfully, all of the pieces are now in place to establish task dependencies. There are four ways that dependencies can exist:
To set up a dependency between two tasks, do the following:
Dragging the dependency arrow from the completion of one task to the beginning of another creates a Finish-Start dependency.
While in Edit mode, you can use the Connect/Disconnect button to add Finish-Start dependencies or remove dependencies between any number of selected tasks simultaneously.
Now, set up the remaining task dependencies as follows:
Once all of the connections are made, your project should look similar to the following:
As you can see, the project is really starting to take shape. However, as the project manager, it’s not quite time to assign resources to the tasks. The next few steps take care of a little bit of project housekeeping.
Step 8: Creating Hammock Tasks
In the life of a project, there are certain tasks whose duration is dependent on both when the previous task ends and when the next task can start. These tasks, known as Hammock Tasks, are useful when your project faces a hard deadline.
Hammock tasks can help you decide which tasks can be compressed if the project is running behind schedule, or if there are any external factors that influence when parts of the project must happen.
Now that all of the tasks in The Game Plan project have their dependencies set, you can see (roughly) how long the project should take to hit the final milestone, Game Release. As it just so happens, the Game Release milestone falls a few weeks short of a major gaming conference, which gives the project a hard deadline for completion.
In reviewing the other parts of the project, the one task that seems the most flexible for converting into a Hammock task is the Public Beta. If additional time is needed for squashing bugs, the team can use some of the Public Beta time to do that work, while still ensuring the project releases on schedule.
In Step 7, the Game Release task received a Finish-to-Start prerequisite from the Public Beta task. However, the Game Release milestone needs to start when the Public Beta finishes. So, the first order of business is to remove the prerequisite from the Game Release task:
Depending on where you set the Start at earliest date for the Game Release milestone, the Public Beta Hammock task should stretch a bit to fill in the space between the 'Friends and Family' Beta task and the Game Release milestone.
Step 9: Editing the Work Week
One thing that you may need to do as a project manager is to define the work week. For example, the typical 40-hour work week is Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, with an hour of unpaid lunch somewhere in between.
To define the work week for your company/project:
Even the most accommodating work week will occasionally have days that are out of the ordinary. Whether it’s a national holiday, a team-wide training seminar, an industry expo or conference, or just a patch of bad weather that keeps folks out of the office, setting exceptions to the regular work schedule can be key to keeping a project on track.
In looking at the calendar, there are three holidays that fall during this particular project’s duration (Labor Day, Halloween, and U.S. Thanksgiving) that need to be factored into the schedule.
If you are working through this tutorial, the holidays you encounter will most assuredly be different than the ones noted here. The takeaway from this example, however, is to show the importance of how holidays and observances can affect a project’s timeline.
When setting up your own projects, be sure to examine the calendar for holidays, observances, and any other special events that could impact normal working hours.
To view and edit the project calendar, do the following:
Step 11: Creating Resources
Now it’s time to start adding the team members, equipment, and materials necessary to bring the project to fruition. Every person, piece of infrastructure, and raw ingredient that contributes to reaching the project’s goal is counted as a resource.
You can remove or rearrange resources at any time by tapping Edit at the bottom of the Resources inspector.
Drag on the handle at the right edge of a resource to move it up or down in the list, or tap the delete button at left to remove a resource. Tap Done when you’re finished rearranging or pruning the resources.
Now that you’ve added the resources necessary for The Game Plan, the next logical thing to do is assign those resources to the tasks.
To assign resources, tap to select the first task in the project (Brainstorm Gameplay), open the Task inspector, and then tap the Assignments tab:
However, before diving into making the assignments, let’s first examine the top part of the Assignments tab:
This section of the Assignments tab gives you the ability to adjust the behavior of tasks when resources are assigned, how tasks are treated for scheduling, and which tasks receive priority over others when leveling your project. The task Assignment behaviors include:
Now that you know how to adjust a task’s behavior, let’s return to the Brainstorm Gameplay task. This particular task requires everyone’s effort, where the team meets in the Conference Room of Extraordinary Size to whiteboard and hash out ideas.
In the Assignments tab, do the following:
When finished, here’s how the Assignments tab for the Brainstorm Gameplay task should appear:
Using similar methods, use the information in the following table to set task behaviors and assign resources:
When you’ve finished assigning everyone to the project, it should look similar to the following:
Step 13: Setting Individual Schedule Exceptions
Individual staff members may have personalized work schedules, and they’ll almost certainly have individual needs for time off over the course of a project.
To display an employee’s normal schedule:
Once a project gets started, tracking costs and expenses is a critical part of your role as project manager. As part of setting up the project and determining how much it will cost, you can assign costs to every resource used or acquired during the course of the project, including Staff, Equipment, and Materials.
Resources can be assigned both Cost per Hour and/or a Cost per Use in the Resources inspector. Miscellaneous costs not associated with a specific resource can instead be added to the task itself, as Task Cost in the Task inspector.
To get an idea of how much this project will cost, start by assigning an hourly rate to the team members:
To see the overall cost of the project, tap to select the Project inspector and look at the Total Cost field. Knowing this in advance helps you to plan for additional costs, or it could force you to go back and reallocate resources if the project is over budget.
The Total Cost of the project, however, isn’t entirely accurate right now. This is because the Public Beta has been set up as a Hammock Task, which allows it to shrink or grow as the project progresses. You’ll want to keep a close eye on the Total Cost, as it will most certainly go down, as the duration of the Hammock Task shortens.
Step 15: Leveling the Project
After assigning team members and equipment to the tasks, you can ensure the team is at its most productive by Leveling the workload across resources and tasks.
It’s hard to overstate the power of leveling in OmniPlan. When you first level a project, you cross the line between human and machine—making the statement that you’ve added everything you know about the project to the plan, and now it’s time to see what OmniPlan can do to help get all those things done optimally. Automation happens, and everything moves to its most efficient place based on the model of the project you’ve described.
To level the resource workload for your project, do the following:
Unless your staff is already in the optimal configuration you’ll see the tasks in the Gantt view shift to accommodate the most efficient use of their time.
If you tap on the Project inspector, you’ll notice that the Total Cost has already gone down slightly due to shrinkage in the Public Beta hammock task.
With tasks set and resources assigned and leveled, the project now reflects the best of all possible worlds—one where unforeseen hindrances don’t bog down progress. A world where optimistic estimates rule the day.
This is the world that is captured when a Baseline for progress is set. The Baseline is used to compare the project’s initial expectations against how the project is actually progressing. Setting the Baseline is important because, as the project manager, it enables you to adjust milestones and resource allocations to complete the project on time.
To set a Baseline, do the following:
Your project can have more than one Baseline; simply add another by tapping Set Baseline at the bottom of the View menu. This allows you to compare how the project is progressing compared to the original timeline or against subsequent baselines.
What Comes Next?
The Game Plan project is now in its ideal form, right before the real work begins.
By laying out the project in OmniPlan, you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect. All of the tasks are in place, resources are assigned, you’ve set up the baseline, and you know how much all of this is going to cost. Well done!
Now comes the fun part of updating and managing the project along the way. The next chapter, Managing a Project, shows you how to use a variety of tools to see your project through to completion.
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