Site search powered by Google

3.6. Understanding and Correcting your schedule

In the process of planning a complex schedule, with multiple resources, dependencies and constraints, it is almost inevitable that one is going to encounter inconsistencies in the schedule. The inconsistencies fall into two categories, resource overallocations and violated dependencies.

Intellisys provides means to locate such inconsistencies. Use the ScheduleShow schedule conflicts option or click the button directly to the left of the attributes table's horizontal scroll bar. This button will be flashing if there are any schedule conflicts. A window pops up which displays all the dependency and resource conflicts that exist in your schedule. Click on one such conflict. The project/task row (in the hierarchical view) that contains the conflicting task gets highlighted.

Resource overallocations: If it is a resource conflict, use the ToolsTask lists/Resource Utilization view to see all the tasks the concerned resource is assigned to during the period of the overallocating task. The Histogram in this view will show a red bar indicating that the resource is overallocated. The tooltip that comes up when you place your mouse on the overalloacted day will show all the tasks that are allocated to the resource on that day.

Typically, a resource overallocation occurs because two or more tasks have been constrained to overlap. Once you have identified the tasks, you can modify the constraints as you desire to remove the overallocation. It may also happen that multiple tasks have been allocated for the same time period because they have not been set to Level Resources . Clicking on the Level Resources column against all such tasks will cause such tasks to be rescheduled.

Violated dependencies: If it is a dependency conflict, double click on the line showing the dependency violation ( or on the violated dependency arrow in the Gantt chart). A window will be displayed with detailed information on the dependency and the reason for the dependency being violated.

Again, typically, dependencies are violated because of tasks that are constrained to start or finish too soon. You may change the constraints as you wish to correct the dependency.

In this way, each conflict can be studied and corrected. Once you are satisfied with the schedule of certain projects, and you don't wish them to change, use the ScheduleFreeze selected project schedules option.

Once you are at a satisfactory state of your schedule and henceforth want to record this as the original schedule dates, when changes are incorporated at a later date, use the ScheduleSet selected project schedule as baseline option. This will create shadow images of each task bar in the Gantt chart for the current schedule. When a task's schedule is changed at a later date, its shadow image will remain fixed, showing the difference between the original schedule and the current scheule.