Intelligent Project Scheduling in Project Management Software
- Intelligent scheduling shifts schedules easily
- Microsoft Project import and export
- Supports all task types and constraints
What is "Intelligent Project Scheduling?"
Project schedules often start as lists of the steps that have to take place before a project is considered complete. Tasks are given durations, or estimated timeframes to complete the work. A good project schedule will also have relationships (dependencies) among tasks. For example, task B cannot get started until task A is complete. Or, task C and D can work in tandem, but must be complete before task G can get started.
Project Insight allows project managers to enter in the tasks and their estimated durations, and the task relationships. Then Project Insight automatically calculates the start and end dates for each task.
Why is intelligent based scheduling so important?
First and foremost, the reason most folks are searching for a project management tool, is so that they can reduce their administrative load, and increase the amount of time they spend working on and completing projects. Intelligent scheduling can save you tons of time!
For example, in Project Insight, if your project's start date gets delayed for whatever reason, and your tasks are set up with proper relationships, all you need to do is to edit the start date of the entire project and your schedule will automatically shift, regardless of whether the project has 10 tasks or 1000 tasks. But imagine what would happen if your project got delayed and you had to change the start and end dates for every task and your project were 100 tasks long! It might take hours instead of minutes to make those modifications--an administrative nightmare.
What to look for when you are evaluating solutions
Intelligent scheduling for projects is the standard for commonly used desktop project management software applications and of the high-end, Project Management Institute compliant software applications. The ubiquity of these mechanisms for scheduling tasks, gives evidence of their importance.
Project Insight and other solutions are mid-range solutions. However, not all mid-range solutions perform these common dependency calculations or duration-based scheduling. It may not always be obvious whether or not a particular project management solution uses intelligent scheduling. That is why it is important to ask the company representative to demonstrate the feature before you make a purchasing decision.
These requirements are often overlooked during the decision-making phase, only to learn the project scheduling consequences several months following the purchase of the software.
More information on the intelligent scheduling features in Project Insight.