Somewhere on LinkedIn, I saw that Autodesk was looking for a Production Scheduling Expert to interface with users and report back on ideas for how to make Shotgrid/Flow a better tool for production tracking and scheduling. Let’s help 'em out! What, in your opinion, are the simplest, most easy-to implement things that would make your user experience better? I’m particularly asking production managers. (NOT coders/developers). Whenever the answer is “just write a custom script,” I want to sue Autodesk for mental pain and suffering. Our development team is BUSY. They are EXPENSIVE. I’m looking for the things that a production manager should be able to do through the user interface and basic functionality, without needing to run to a developer.
Here are the top 3 things Shotgrid/Flow could do to make my life easier:
Custom roll ups (as described here: Give status percentage summary by exclude omit). Ability for dependencies to ignore certain statuses. (for example, if a task is omitted, it’s dependency should be ignored)
Filter & Report using query fields.
Better UI for status dependency setup and tracking (ability to draw dependencies on the Gantt chart rather than right-clicking; having a Gantt chart for the task template so that we can set up the dependencies visually at the time we create the template, etc).
Of these, we already scripted our own solutions for the second two. (but would have been great if we didn’t have to). The first one we don’t have a scripted solution for yet (doing so caused issues with unintentionally triggering pinned tasks)
We need to be able to use the task templates to schedule in gaps (a task starts 5 days after the previous dependent task) and without creating fake “downtime” tasks.
Also, something we developed into and were surpised wasn’t an expected use case… using task templates “a-la-cart” where you can apply multiple templates based on specific use cases (having one template to add all common tasks, and then adding a template of FX tasks only to scenes that will need them). We already have custom scripts to make this work well, but you’d have some bugs if you tried to do this without the extra work-arounds.
Displaying a view where rows can be entities and columns can be tasks (but doesn’t require you to show ALL tasks in a given pipeline step).
Not sure if this is what your meaning but thought I’d chime in on a couple of your items.
omitted tasks/dependency ignoring - If you set your omitted tasks to Milestones they become points in time instead of holding a duration which effectively mutes them in the dependency tree without breaking it.
Drawing dependencies - If you give your tasks start/due/duration data, even if its for a template, so they appear in the gantt view, you can hold down ALT/Option on your keyboard and you’ll get a small circle on either side of each task as you hover over them. You can click/drag those to other tasks as dependency links. If you don’t want your template to hold dates/durations you can just clear those after your linking is done.
On a side note, if you hold ALT/Option and click/drag the tasks bar in the gantt while a dependency exists you will introduce a dependency offset (you’ll see the dependency arrow turn blue).
Since we are making a lists of scheduling related requests, I’d really like the split task function to be ironed out more so that it works with some of the related tools like the resourcing app.
Also task dependency offsets could use some additional controls in the site. Maybe an exposed connection entity could work but just the ability to set some general rules for each connection would be helpful directly in the site instead of just in the API. Even if it’s purely reporting related so that those rules could be visible in the site would be helpful.