Project Planning Features

Take advantage of a number of standard project planning features that help you build and maintain plans.

Plan Settings

The plan settings that you select for a plan determine whether you can view plan amounts at cost rates, at billing rates, or both, and how those amounts are calculated. To access plan settings, click Plan Settings on the Actions menu while in Plan mode.

Plan settings include:

• Budget Type: Indicate if you want the plan to be based on cost rates, billing rates, or both.
• Labor settings: Specify how DPS determines cost or billing rates and related information that is used to calculate plan amounts for employees and generic resources.
• Expense settings: Specify how DPS determines cost or billing rates and related information that is used to calculate plan amounts for reimbursable and direct expenses.
• Consultants settings: Specify how DPS determines cost or billing rates and related information that is used to calculate plan amounts for reimbursable and direct consultants.

Check Out and Check In a Plan

To prevent conflicts when multiple users have access to a plan, you must use the Actions menu to explicitly check out a plan before you can make changes to it in the Projects hub. While you have a plan checked out, no other users can update it. When you complete your work or when you navigate away from the plan to another location in DPS, it is automatically checked back in so that others can update it. If necessary, you can also use the Actions menu to explicitly check in one or more plans.

Publish a Plan

If you make changes to a plan and the plan is checked in, other users who have access to the plan can check the plan out and make additional changes. However, until the plan is published, it cannot be updated in either of the Resource Management applications, Resource View and Project View, and the unpublished version is not available in planning reports.

Save a Baseline Version of a Plan

At any point in time, you can save the current version of a plan as its baseline version. The baseline serves as a snapshot of the plan at that point in time. You can then compare the baseline to subsequent plan versions. You can have only one baseline version for any plan. If you save another baseline, the new version replaces the previous baseline.

Select Planning Grid Columns

The grid on each of the tabs in Plan mode can contain any of a variety of summary data columns. You can select the columns that display in the grid. For example, on the Labor tab, you might choose to display the Total Planned Hours, Total ETC Hours, Assignment Start, and Assignment End columns, in addition to the calendar period columns. Make these selections in the Column Settings & Selections dialog box for each grid.

If you set a project up to be planned based on both cost and billing, you can view either cost or billing amounts, and you can select different sets of columns for each of those views.

Enter Notes for Work Breakdown Structure Elements

If you include the Notes column on a planning grid, you can enter notes for any work breakdown structure element at any level of the structure. To enter or review notes for a work breakdown structure element in a plan, click (if no notes exist for the element) or (if notes already exist) in the Notes column on the work breakdown structure element's grid row.