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Scheduling Problems

Andy Geers

March 20, 2009 11:40

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Our production staff have been finding a few issues with the way that scheduling works at the moment. For instance, if a deadline moves, they might want to take a bunch of tasks, all with different durations, and they might want to change the end date on all of them. At the moment, their start dates remain fixed, so changing the end date just stretches the duration, whereas what they want is to keep the durations constant but automatically update the start dates to compensate.

This might be easy enough if all the tasks were the same length, but it gets tricky when they're all different.

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2 comments

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  Mike Romey March 20, 2009 14:21

  Hi Andy,

  We have some of the exact same issues with our scheduling.  In a previous post I made a suggested of better gannting tools.  One feature which might make this request possible would be the ability to group or parent a bunch of tasks together in the gannt.  The group or parent of gannted tasks could then be shifted along the time line always maintaining the original durations and offsetting of each task to each other while offering the ability to uniformly move them along the time line. Of benifit the group of gannted task could show you the summary of those task while maintaning the integrity of their start and end times.

  This lack of functionality from the UI can be overcome via an API tool that simply applys offsets to a group of tasks.  The only gannt related tools we have built are ones to split tasks and merge tasks.  One of the features I haven't added to the split task tool is the ability to offset them one after the other or align them to head or align them to tail. 

  Creating a gannt offset would be a very valuable tool for our production team the only issue I have is how to maintain a UI outside of shotgun that is flexable enough to pick a bunch of different tasks.  I really think a feature like this belongs in Shotgun.

  -Romey

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  Nephi Sanchez April 17, 2009 15:49

  Hi Andy & Mike,

   

  Here's a tip that could help you out:

  1) select all the tasks you want to move by using the record selectors at the far left:

  

  
  2) Now click into the *middle* of one of the tasks (don't grab the edges!):

  

   

  3) Now drag that one task to the right:

  
  

   

  4) Let go, and *all* the tasks that you've selected will fall in line and get offset by the same amount, and they maintain their relationship to each other:

  

   

  Let me know if this helps!