OmniPlan for iOS is designed to help you visualize, maintain, and simplify your projects. Break down tasks, optimize the required resources, control costs, and monitor your entire plan—all at a glance. Collaborate with your colleagues and share every detail, update a calendar with your days off, and process changes one-by-one or all in one go. OmniPlan provides features like Gantt charts, schedules, summaries, milestones, and critical path highlighting to let you manage all of your activities. From customizable views to fast data entry, OmniPlan helps you manage projects that are as simple or complex as you need them to be—without the complexity.

OmniPlan 3 is the most advanced desktop-class project management app you’ll find on iOS. Built to be fully compatible with OmniPlan 3 for Mac, you can seamlessly manage your projects in OmniPlan wherever you are. Whether you’re in the boardroom or in your truck on a job site, OmniPlan is there for you.

To help guide you through the documentation and better learn everything there is to know about OmniPlan, a list of the chapters in this book follows.

Chapter 1, Introduction

The chapter you are currently reading provides an introduction to OmniPlan, describes the contents of this book, and offers tips on staying up to date with the latest versions of the OmniPlan documentation (the downloadable eBook is a great way to stay on top of updates).

Chapter 2, Using the Document Browser

This chapter describes managing your project files using OmniPlan’s built in document browser. Beyond creating, organizing, and sharing your documents, the document browser also holds tools for getting help and customizing your OmniPlan experience at a high level—you’ll learn all about those tools here.

Chapter 3, Getting Synced

If you’re working on a project with OmniPlan on multiple devices and you’d like your documents to stay in sync between them, or you’d just like the additional layer of backup provided by cloud-based storage, you’ll find instructions here for setting up single user file sync with OmniPresence. For users of OmniPlan Pro, this chapter also includes a quick-start guide for connecting to a shared server repository (setting up and using the collaborative publication and subscription features of OmniPlan Pro is covered in Chapter 7).

Chapter 4, Working in the Project Editor

In OmniPlan for iOS the project editor is where you will spend most of your time, from creating your project’s first task to marking the last milestone complete. This chapter provides an overview of the tools available for creating, customizing, and curating even the most complex projects using the editing tools available in the Gantt chart and its associated inspectors.

Chapter 5, Building Your First Project

Once you are familiar with the tools in the Project Editor you are ready to get your first project up and running. The tutorial in this chapter guides you through the preliminary phase of effective OmniPlan use: building a model simulation-style description of your project inside OmniPlan. When completed, you’ll have the first baseline picture of a plan from which your project can begin in earnest.

Topics covered include:

• Creating a new project
• Adding tasks, milestones, and task groups
• Describing dependency relationships between tasks
• Setting the project’s work schedule
• Adding resources and assigning them to tasks
• Assigning costs to tasks and resources
• Optimizing resource use by leveling
• Setting a baseline for progress

Chapter 6, Managing a Project

Once your project is set up with as many of its constituent variables, dependencies, resources, and scheduling constraints as possible, the real power of OmniPlan emerges. This chapter introduces the tools you will use to monitor, update, and revise your project as work proceeds, to help ensure that the work—from the first task to the last milestone—will be as quick and efficient as possible.

Once a project begins the tasks required to manage it aren’t as chronologically linear as the steps required to set it up. This tutorial chapter covers a range of tools available to help keep the project on track—but it’s not expected that you’ll need to use them all every day. Topics covered include:

• Updating, splitting, and rescheduling tasks
• Resolving violations
• Leveling and setting new baselines mid-project
• Simulating milestone completion estimates (Pro)

Chapter 7, Multi-User Collaboration (Pro)

If you are working on a project with multiple contributors, the publication and subscription features of OmniPlan Pro can be invaluable. This chapter introduces OmniPlan’s multi-user collaboration features, and guides you through setting up an account and syncing your files with a shared server repository. Balancing resource loads across projects that share a common resource pool and tracking changes to the project made by other users are also covered here.

Chapter 8, Keyboard Shortcuts

If you are using OmniPlan for iOS with an external keyboard connected to your device, you can take advantage of OmniPlan’s built-in keyboard shortcuts. This chapter provides a list of the available shortcuts based on where you are and what you’re doing in the app.

Chapter 9, Getting Help

If you ever get stuck when working on something in OmniPlan, if you have a problem installing the app, or you just want to tell our Support Humans or DocWranglers what an awesome job they’re doing, feel free to get in touch. This chapter points you to all of the help resources we have available: Support Humans, Support Articles, Videos, and Documentation.

Glossary

The glossary contains an alphabetical list of special terms you will encounter throughout the app, this documentation, and other project management resources you might be familiar with. If you are just starting out in project management or you are curious about how OmniPlan implements certain concepts, this is a great place to check.

New standard features in OmniPlan 3 include:

• Network View—An elegant and easy way to rapidly prototype and visualize your project’s flow as a network diagram of nodes connected by dependencies.
• Meeting Task Type—A new resource allocation option that allows you to specify if multiple resources need to work on a task independently or simultaneously.
• Catch-Up—If everything is going as planned, bring the completion percentage of every task (or just the selected tasks) in your project up to today’s date.
• Reschedule—If you have tasks which were planned to be complete by now, but aren’t, reschedule them with the tap of a button.
• Leveling Priority—Define leveling priority for tasks in your project.
• Display Off-Hours—Display all off-hours, holidays, and weekends as shaded vertical bars in the Gantt chart.
• Unlinked Duration and Effort—Set different values for a task’s effort and duration, then let OmniPlan crunch the numbers for your resource assignment percentage.

These features are on top of a list of returning features that make OmniPlan for iOS the leader in its class, including:

• Meticulously Designed Gantt Chart Interface—Rapidly build and easily maintain a project with this scalable, flexible view.
• Smart Scheduling and Automatic Leveling—Once your project is set up, OmniPlan’s automated scheduling and leveling tools help optimize your resource use every step of the way.
• Multiple Baselines and Critical Path Display—See your project's priorities clearly with critical paths, and reposition to address challenges that arise with as many baselines as you need.
• Printing and Export Options—Print over the air, send OmniPlan files via email, or export to common formats such as PDF and HTML.
• The Latest iOS Technologies—On devices that support them, OmniPlan includes Spotlight search, multitasking, 3D Touch controls from the app icon, and hardware keyboard shortcuts.
• OmniPresence File Sync—Sync and store your OmniPlan projects in the cloud with a free Omni Sync Server account.

If you have any specific comments you’d like to send us about the documentation, please do. You can drop us an email message via our Support queue, or you can ping us on Twitter; we’re @OmniWranglers.

Finally, we’d like to thank you for taking the time to read the docs.