Use Bookings Rather Than Assignments to Calculate Task Schedules in OpenAir

Is your company using resource bookings faithfully, but you still need to separately manage assignments to keep your task dates and planned hours in line? There is a little-known feature that can allow you to optionally choose, project by project, to use bookings alone to calculate task schedules. Here’s how…

Create a custom field:

• Navigate to Administration > Global Settings > Custom Fields.
• Click the +Create button, then click New Custom field.

A form appears.

• Select Project from the “Add a custom field to:” dropdown list.
• Select Checkbox from the “Type of field to add:” dropdown list.
• Click Continue.

Another form appears.

• Enter the Field name— This must be exactly “project_plan_based_on_bookings”.
• Make sure the Active box is checked.
• Enter a Display name of your liking — for example, “Calculate project schedule based on bookings”.
• Consider adding a Hint – for example: “Task end dates & planned hours will be based on task-level bookings.”
• Click Save.

This new custom field will now appear on the Project Properties form. When it is checked, the following behaviors will be activated:

• The Planned hours field on any project tasks will become read-only
• Creating task-level bookings will automatically update the planned hours and the end dates of the associated tasks
• As usual, the task planned hours and end dates will “roll up” to the phase and project level

A few important caveats:

• Bookings MUST be created with a task specified. Project-level bookings will not influence the project schedule.
• Task start dates are NOT influenced by the bookings. To manage the start dates, consider one of the following options:
  1. set up task Predecessors to link dependent tasks together logically
     • will allow the start date to float with the related dates from the predecessor tasks as they change
  2. manually update the task Start date as desired as an over-ride
     • the start date will be fixed at the over-ride date until you update it manually

• Be careful if your timesheet configuration relies only on task assignments to make tasks visible on users’ timesheets. If this is the case, consider configuring bookings as an additional way to provide task visibility. Otherwise, you will need to add task assignments, but you won’t need to worry about the assignment hours or percentage allocations – these will be controlled by the bookings.