Create dependencies

- Dependencies are the final fundamental piece of project management in OmniPlan, and they work in the way you probably expect them to. Dependencies are the way that you link one task to another, or task to milestones, or milestones to milestones, indicating how one is dependent on another, or the way in which one must follow from the next to accomplish your end goal. And this is the very principle of the gantt or waterflow chart, is to see how one thing leads to the next.

So we're going to start to create some dependencies here and there will be some more time later to work in great detail. We just want to understand how they look and how they work for the time being. And you can see in this design section that a lot of things will follow fairly linearly. That is, the feedback of round one will come after the concept word is done and then the design columns will come after the feedback, and so on. So the easiest way to start designing our dependencies is just to roll over and you see that when we roll over these little dark lines are available to us.

In fact a number of things are available to us when we roll over the project in the gantt chart. But this is the one we're interested in because if I drag this arrow I am literally saying that for feedback round one to start concept boards have to be done. And once I drag and release that, you can see now I've got the little grey line which is a dependency and automatically my feedback has moved to the right because it can't begin until the concept board is done.

And I can continue this because the design comps can't start until the feedback's done. So we say that one depends on the next, and so on. So all of these will lead one to the next and in fact design approval which is a milestone will not be done until the feedback on round two is done. So after the feedback on round two, that's the prerequisite that we would expect then to get the design approval milestone.

So we'll go say that is there. Obviously we're missing some connections there. In fact this is looking a little confused so why don't we go ahead and say yep, this one has to finish for the next round of feedback and so on. And you see that the milestone moves all the way to the end. Now we have some different possibilities with dependencies, but we're going to get into all of the details in some more detail in movies.

But, for instance, all of these dependencies say that the task has to be completed for the next task to start. Okay, concept board has to be completed before feedback round one can start. That's not our only choice with dependencies. We can also set dependencies such that two tasks can start at the same time, or one task can't start until another task starts, or one task can't finish until another task finishes. So there's different ways that dependencies can tie our tasks together.

But you can start to see, as soon as we start to apply our dependencies that we're starting to get an idea of what that gantt chart looks like and the sense in which it is like a waterfall, that one task leads to the next, leads to the next. And just our design phase is starting to look like that now. Of course, our next step is to fill in the rest of our dependencies and very little of this is ever set in stone. So as we go through you may see, as you're managing some more dependencies, even some more tasks or more milestones that need to be added along the way.