The portfolio
The projects page lists everything in flight. Its job is not to show you one projectProjectA job seen as a whole in project planning: a body of work with a budget, a team, dependencies and a deadline. Its tasks are still planned as ordinary appointments on the board. in detail, it is to tell you which project to open next.
The portfolio as a list
Five ways to look at the same thing​
"How is the portfolio doing" is a question people want answered in different shapes, so the same projects are available five ways from the view switcher on the right of the toolbar.
| View | Best for |
|---|---|
| Overview | The state of the whole portfolio on one page: the numbers, what needs attention, what is coming up, capacity, the pipeline and the budget. |
| List | Knowing what you are looking for. Sort, filter and group like any other grid. |
| Tiles | Scanning. One card per project, each carrying its health measures. |
| Timeline | Sequence. Projects laid out against time, so overlaps and imminent starts are obvious. |
| Kanban | Status. Projects as cards in the lanes of the project board, moved from one stage to the next by dragging. |
Every view shares one toolbar. On the left sit New, the search box and the filter that picks which projects to show: Open projects, Closed projects or All projects. On the right sit the tools that belong to the current view, the view switcher, and Layouts, which saves the page as you have arranged it. The open filter is saved with the layoutLayoutA saved arrangement of the planning board - visible resources, columns, and settings - that can be reused., and it starts on open projects, because a finished project rarely needs your attention. See open and closed projects.
The overview​
The Overview is the place to start the day. Where the other views show the projects on the current page, the overview reads every project that matches the search and the open filter, so its numbers are the portfolio's, not the page's.
Along the top, five figures: how many projects are in scope, how many are On track, At risk and Off track, and the Work done across all their tasks. Clicking a count opens the List narrowed to those projects. The narrowing shows as a Project health chip above the list, which also applies to the Tiles and the Timeline until you clear it.
Below the figures, the page is a set of blocks, each linking to where the detail lives:
| Block | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Needs attention | One row per project and problem, the most urgent first: overdue tasks, over budget, planned beyond the budget, people over capacity, unplanned work coming up, tentative work waiting for confirmation. Each row carries the project's verdict, and clicking it opens the project. |
| Coming up | End dates that have already passed, then the project starts, project ends and milestones of the next four weeks. |
| Capacity | The planned work of each teamTeamA second grouping axis for resources, independent of department, used to sort and group them. In the crews view, "crew / team" is the behavior where a booking fans out to every member. against its capacityCapacityThe amount of working time a resource has available in a given period, used to spot over- and under-planning. for the next eight weeks. |
| Pipeline | How many projects sit in each lane of the project board, and how many have no status yet. Clicking it opens the Kanban view. |
| Budget vs progress | The projects whose hours used run furthest ahead of their work done, biggest gap first. The bar is the share of the budget used, the tick the share of the work done. |
| Map | Every project with a site location, colored by health. |
Needs attention only lists what your organization's health rules watch. A rule that is switched off lists nothing here, and a problem that is only a warning is listed after the critical ones. Some signals need a project's full plan to judge, such as blocked tasks, tasks waiting on a dependency or a slip against the baselineBaselineThe original plan frozen in the Gantt chart. Shown underneath the current bars, it is how a project manager sees how far the plan has drifted from what was agreed., and those stay on the project page.
The capacity block covers at most 500 open projects, the ones ending soonest. When there are more, it says so, and a project beyond that limit is not measured for resources.
The overview is a summary, refreshed every few minutes rather than live. A project closed, reopened or moved to another status shows straight away; a change to tasks or appointments can take up to a quarter of an hour to reach the counts.
The list, tiles and timeline​
The List is the reference view. Its columns include the three health measures and the Overall verdict described under health, a budget bar that shows consumed, recorded and planned hours against the budget in one cell, and an optional Open / closed column, hidden by default. Export downloads the rows on the page to Excel.
The tiles can be grouped by customer, category or responsible person, and sorted by end date, importance or job number. Each card carries the same measures as the list, and the header of each group adds up the health of the projects inside it.
The portfolio as tiles
The timeline colors each bar by one measure at a time. Project healthProject healthThe verdict a project gets from the organization’s health rules - On track, At risk or Off track - shown per area as schedule, budget and resources. The rules are set once for every project in application setup, so a project reads the same in the portfolio and on its own page. is the default, and the same dropdown switches to schedule, hours, resources or category, which is how you ask a narrower question such as "which projects are over on hours" without leaving the view. With the capacity strip open, Match capacity colours gives each bar the color its project has in the capacity charts underneath. The timeline shows the plan, it does not change it: projects are moved by changing their tasks, not by dragging their bars.
The portfolio as a timeline
Choosing what the timeline colors by
Every project, in every view except the Overview, has the same actions menu, opened from its kebab button or a right click: Open project, Open project plan, Edit, Reassign, Copy, and Close project... or Reopen.... In the List, selecting several projects adds a Status button to the toolbar, which closes, reopens or sets the status of all of them at once.
Capacity under the timeline​
A Capacity strip opens under the timeline and answers a question the bars cannot: can the people do it. It shares the timeline's time axis, so a project's bar and the weeks it loads line up, and hovering a project highlights its share of every week.
Everything in it is load: the work actually planned on the boards, tentative appointments included. That is the same work the planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline. shows for each person, so every number can be checked and acted on. Tasks that are assigned to someone but not yet planned do not count until they are planned.
Two charts can be shown, each switched on with its checkbox, and both can be grouped by team, departmentDepartmentA grouping of resources used to sort and group rows on the planning board and in the grids. As a group behavior in the crews view, a department cannot be booked; it exists for structure and reporting. or resource typeResource typeA logical grouping of resources, such as "excavator" or "consultant", used to organize and filter them on the planning board.:
- Planned vs capacity stacks the planned hours per week, per project, against the capacity of the people planned on them. Solid is planned, light is tentative.
- Utilization has one row per person and one cell per week, showing how full that week is. A cell turns red only when the person is planned above their capacity; exactly full is not over. A week without capacity records shows its planned hours but no percentage, because there is nothing to measure it against.
Clicking a cell opens that person's week in the Details rail: their planned hours per project with the tentative part beside it, then their Other projects and Non-project work. That is what tells you whether this project is the cause of the overload or merely a victim of it. Hours on projects you cannot see are added up under Other projects without naming them: the load is real, the names are not yours to see.
Capacity comes from capacity records only. Someone without records for a week has no capacity that week, rather than an assumed full day.
The insights panel​
Insights, the lightbulb in the toolbar, opens three more lenses beside the List, Tiles and Timeline. They read the projects on the current page.
A map plots every project with a site location, colored by health or by category. The slider underneath moves a day cursor through the month: projects not active on that day fade, so you see what is live on a given date rather than everything at once. Travel is a real constraint on who can take what, and the map is where that becomes obvious.
Projects on the map
A heatmap counts the projects, or only the overdue ones, per month for each customer, responsible person, category or type, as a table or a chart. It is how you notice that March is already full before promising anything else for March.
Projects per customer per month
The third lens is a scatter of budget against progress. Each project sits at how far through it reports itself to be on one axis and how much of its budget the chosen layer accounts for on the other, with the dot sized by the budget itself. The diagonal is where the two keep pace. A project above the line is using budget faster than it is making progress, and the further above, the earlier it is worth asking why. The Layer dropdown chooses which hours count: planned, which is what the appointments commit; recorded, which is what was tracked against the project; or consumed, which is what the budget ledger records as used. The footer counts the projects with no budget, the ones with a budget but nothing recorded yet, and the ones over budget under your health rules.
Consumed against progress
The Kanban view​
The Kanban view arranges projects in the lanes of the project board, which your administrator defines under work states. Dragging a card to another lane sets the status of that project, and every selected card moves with it. A project whose status no lane maps sits in No status.
A lane carries one status value per back officeBack officeThe ERP or business system Dime.Scheduler plans for - most often Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It owns the master data and remains authoritative over what it receives.. When a card lands in a lane that has no value yet for the card's back office, Dime.Scheduler asks for one and saves it to the work state settings, so the next card goes straight through.
Two kinds of card cannot be moved, and both show a lock. A read-only project takes its status from the back office. A closed project has to be reopened before its status can change. A lane marked as done closes the projects dropped into it, so that drop asks for the same confirmation as Close project....
The Kanban view always shows every project, open and closed, so the open filter and the health chip do not apply there. If no project lanes exist yet, the view says so and points to the work state settings.
Open and closed projects​
Every project is either open or closedClosed projectA finished project. Its appointments are locked, its tasks leave the open tasks list, no time can be registered on it and its pages are read-only. A project closes by hand or when its status reaches a done lane, and Reopen undoes it.. Closed means finished: nobody registers time on it any more, and its plan stops changing. Its history stays exactly as it was.
A project closes in one of three ways:
- Somebody chooses Close project... from its actions menu, from the List's Status button, from the Kanban card or from the project page.
- Its status moves into a lane marked as done on the project board, whether by a drop on the Kanban view, a status change on the project page, or the back office sending that status.
- The back office closes it directly.
Before anything is written, a confirmation spells out what closing does: appointments are locked and can no longer be changed, open tasks leave the open tasks list, no more time can be registered, and the project pages become read-only. It also counts the open tasks and the appointments still planned after today, for information. Closing does not complete the tasks and does not delete the appointments, and nothing is sent back to the back office.
Reopen... reverses all of it: the project and all its appointments are unlocked, and its status stays as it was. Changing the status later works it out again from the lanes, so a project reopened by hand closes again if its status is still in a done lane when it next changes.
Closing and reopening need Manage projects. A read-only project belongs to the back office, so only an administrator can close or reopen it, and the confirmation says when you are doing so as one.
Closed projects carry a Closed badge next to their number in the List, Tiles and Timeline, and are left out of the open filter's default view.
Health​
A project's health is not one number, and the portfolio does not pretend otherwise. Per project, the list shows three measures that only mean something together:
- Schedule - whether the project is on time: overdue tasks, an end date that has passed with work left, an end date that is close with too little progress behind it, a slip against the baseline, blocked tasks or tasks waiting on a dependency.
- Budget status - how many of the budgeted hours have been used, and whether the appointments already planned exceed the budget.
- Resources - whether the people planned on the project are over capacity, counting both the busiest person and the team as a whole. Hovering the cell shows both readings.
Each reads On track, At risk or Off track. A measure that has nothing to judge says why instead: No budget, Nobody planned, No capacity or Not measured. The Overall column rolls the three up into the project's verdict and, when a rule has fired, names it.
A project at 30% progress and 80% of budget is the one to worry about, and neither figure says that alone. The portfolio exists to make that combination visible at a glance rather than leaving you to assemble it.
Finding the ones that matter​
Highlight in the toolbar picks projects out by condition: Off track, At risk, Behind schedule, Over budget, Overdue or Ending soon. Projects matching every condition you pick stay bright and the rest fade, and the counter on the button says how many made the cut. It is a quicker way of asking "what needs me today" than sorting on three columns in turn. Every condition follows the health rules, so a rule that is switched off highlights nothing.
Highlighting the projects that are over budget
What turns a project amber or red​
Nothing here is a fixed rule that Dime.Scheduler decided for you, and nothing is set per page or per user either. One set of health rules applies to every project in the organization, in the portfolio and on each project page alike, so a project reads the same wherever you look at it. An administrator sets them on the Projects tab of application setup: which rules count, from which value they warn and from which they turn critical, and which signal counts as progress.
That is deliberate, because what counts as behind depends entirely on how your projects normally run: a two-week installation and a two-year program do not deserve the same alarm. The rules and what they mean are covered in progress, attention and health.