Hello!
First off, I’d like to say that through the autodesk case management portal it is impossible to submit feedback (“Ideas and Suggestions”) for Flow Production Tracking or Flow Generative Scheduling, since ‘Release’ is a mandatory field with no dropdown options. Considering they’ve removed the public roadmap, it’s no surprise Autodesk isn’t aware that their only avenue for direct feedback isn’t functioning at all. So I’ve come here to post my notes instead.
I’ve tested out Flow Generative Scheduling, as we’ve developed an extremely similar solution for generating large schedules with specific constraints in-house. As we’d love for a highly maintained tool to exist that serves this purpose, I have some feedback regarding the first rollout:
1: Connecting to our site is not working. I’ve tried formatting the site URL and login username differently, but no matter what it says the username or site URL is invalid.
So, I tested the feature with the sample JSON file and editing some parameters.
2: Constraints sometimes are ignored, regardless of being feasible. I generated a schedule with a ‘Start no earlier than Aug 25’ constraint on a task, and the task was scheduled for Aug 07.
3: Resources are a confusing entity.
The example JSON file had 1 Unit of the ‘Animation’ resource. The generated schedule still scheduled several animation tasks on the same day(s), meaning I wouldn’t have enough resources to actually fulfill these tasks during their scheduled time in reality. (Unless I’m totally misunderstanding ‘Resources’ in this context of this tool altogether)
It would be beneficial if you could name individual ‘resource units’ within a resource class (ex. Animators within the ‘Animation’ class) and have the schedule ‘assign’ these resources to each task, to be able to manage individual schedules and overarching department/production schedules. They should also be able to have individual start and end dates on the project (as well as individual vacation dates, as can be obtained through Shotgrid/Flow bookings). Otherwise, unless your entire team is onboarded at once, and all of their tasks are already ready to start on that day, you’ll end up with downtime following your generated schedule (or you’d have to tediously set constraints for each task, and at that point, just schedule manually).
4: All task durations are in terms of days, and buffer periods between tasks are not a variable/constraint that can be added. Downstream tasks are set to start on the same day as the due date of its upstream dependency.
If a task takes the entire day to complete on its last scheduled day, and the dependent task/next task starts on the same day the initial task is completed- we have now lost a day of work on the dependent task’s schedule, and it has to be delayed. This will snowball for larger schedules and make department/productions end much later than they were scheduled for.
Task durations should provide the option to use bid/duration values in terms of hours, so tasks can be realistically scheduled during the same day or not, depending on what hour of the workday the task is scheduled to end. Of course, setting durations to hours vs days should be optional, so the user has the option to be this granular if they need to be.
Secondly, if a task has to go through a long review process or file prep/transfer time upon completion, there should be an optional buffer value before the downstream dependency can begin. Without this buffer value factoring this time into the task duration (bid), or ignoring this, will generate a misleading/inaccurate schedule.
5: The creation and editing of a OSF JSON file.
I don’t mind the JSON setup, but for most users in production, setting up a JSON file and learning the general rules and format of OSF is simply too complicated and cumbersome for a tool that should be used by Project Managers and Producers. An Excel import with an existing template or in-web user interface to make a schedule, would make it much more accessible, and be easily translatable into a usable JSON file for your software to generate a schedule with.
I’m happy autodesk is developing a product with these goals in mind, but in it’s current state, I can’t see it adopted in my studio. Would love to see if anyone has similar thoughts, or disagrees! I’d be happy to be corrected about some of these points as I’m not fully familiarized with the tool yet.
Thank you,
-Phil F
)