For a project schedule that deals with tens of resources and that receives tens of new jobs every day, readability and user-friendly browsing of the schedule are essential.
For this purpose, Direct Planning Project features a set of tools to ease browsing and editing the schedule.
Browsing the schedule
Time scales
Direct Planning offers 5 time scales that let you view from one day to several weeks at a glance. The zoom level of these time scales can be customized.
Mouse-scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
To quickly move within the schedule, you would often scroll using the mouse wheel and the many keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few examples of keyboard shortcuts:
- Go to the current date
- Browse the jobs of current project: first, last, previous or next.
- Go to the selected job
Global browsing
Global browsing displays a miniature version of the schedule. Clicking in this window enables quick access to a given date.
Highlighting jobs
Job highlighting is a very convenient feature of Direct Planning Project. It lets you visually highlight a set of jobs that meet a given criterion in the schedule. Jobs that don’t meet this criterion are grayed out.
A few examples:
- Jobs of the same customer
- Jobs of the same project (interlinked)
- Jobs with alert, delayed jobs
It is then possible to very quickly browse among the highlighted jobs. Ideal for browsing the jobs of a project or rapidly scrolling through the delayed jobs.
Filtering jobs
In the same spirit as the highlighting that grays out jobs not meeting a criterion, the “Filter” feature enables removing them from the current display. Thus, only the jobs meeting the selected criterion remain on screen.
Direct Planning Project – Filtering jobs of a project
Editing a schedule: a few common actions
Drag and drop
Moving jobs with ease is one of the basic principles of Direct Planning. The schedule controller simply moves the jobs with the mouse, and the planning assistance automatically rearranges the schedule complying with the time and precedence constraints.
Rescheduling a job
The “Reschedule” feature is very useful in every day’s life. For example, it takes one click to reschedule a job or a project in 24 hours, in one week or on a given date.
Direct Planning Project – Rescheduling jobs
Changing resource
Changing resource is very easy to perform in Direct Planning Project. You can simply move a job onto another resource with a drag-and-drop or edit a resource from within the job details.
Subdividing a job
The software features job subdivision, which lets you postpone the end of a job. This feature also enables you to parallelize job achievement, loading another resource with part of it.