Project Planning - Overview

The Project Planning tool is designed to plan a project's work, timeline and costs based on when resources are available. Using the Project Planning tool to build a project plan can help answer the following types of questions:

Project Planning - Can we take on the proposed project?

Do we have the resources to take on a project?
How long will the project take to complete based on available resources?
How much will the project cost us?

Project Tracking - How are our active projects doing?

How is a project tracking against its budget? (i.e. Actual Hours vs. Estimated Hours)
When is the project currently scheduled to be completed, and for how much?
What would happen if we switched resources from one project to another project?

Help Overview

Understanding the basics of Project Planning

This section will show you the very basic features and functions of the Project Planning tool such as:

How to build a small test project
How to add tasks and estimates
How to assign resources
How to level a project to determine how long the project will take based on your resource availability
How to publish a project to make it go live.

Before adding real projects for the first time

After you understand the basics of the project scheduling tool, there are some important issues to consider before you start creating or importing actual projects into the Project Planning tool. Some considerations include:

Will the proposed project be a planned project (Project Planning project) or an unplanned project (Project Assignments view project)?
How and when should I import existing projects into the Project Planning tool?
How do I spread resources across multiple projects so that their time is not all taken up in one project?

Details and FAQs

Full instructions on creating project schedules, analyzing resource availability and tracking active projects.