A single project
Opening a 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. gives you a set of tabs. Each one answers a different question, and it is worth knowing which tab answers which, because they overlap less than they look.
| Tab | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Overview | How is this project doing overall? |
| Tasks | What work does it consist of, and what state is each piece in? |
| Team | Who is on it, and is anybody over-allocated? |
| Gantt Chart | How do the tasks depend on each other, and what is the critical path? |
| Planning | What is actually scheduled, and what is still unplanned? |
| Kanban | What is moving right now? |
| Time | What has been logged and spent against it? |
Two tabs are conditional. Gantt Chart appears for projects that are available in the Gantt, and Time only for users who may view timesheets.
Overview​
The landing tab, and a summary rather than a place to work. It carries the project's health measures, the tasks currently flagged as needing attention, and the budget position.
Tasks​
The work breakdown: every task, its dates, its progress and its state.
Tasks can be created and edited here when your role allows it. This is the part that changed most recently. A project no longer has to originate in the 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. to be managed in Dime.Scheduler, though in most setups the back office is still where projects come from and remains the master of them.
Gantt Chart​
The project's tasks laid out against time, with the dependencies between them. Dependencies determine the order of the work and therefore the critical path: the chain of tasks where a day lost is a day lost to the whole project.
The chart itself is the same Gantt component used elsewhere, so constraints, baselinesBaselineThe 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 scheduling modes behave exactly as they do there.
Planning​
The bridge back to the planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline.. It shows what is scheduled and what is not, and lets you drag an unplanned taskOpen taskA task that has not been scheduled yet. It waits in the open task list to be placed on the planning board. onto a board to plan it.
This is where "we agreed to do this, have we actually booked it" gets answered. Planning coverage is the summary figure, and the unplanned remainder is the part that needs your attention: work nobody has committed a resourceResourceAn entity that can carry out work - a person, vehicle, tool, or room - that you schedule on the planning board. to is work that will not happen, however confident the project looks elsewhere.
Kanban​
The project's tasks arranged in columns by state, for the day-to-day view of what is moving.
The columns are not fixed. They come from the work statesWork stateA column on the Kanban board, defined by an administrator. Statuses arriving from the back office are mapped onto work states so the board speaks your organization’s vocabulary. your administrator defines, and the statuses arriving from your back office are mapped onto them, so the board speaks your organization's vocabulary rather than a generic one. Typical columns are Not started, In progress, Blocked, In review and Done.
A status that has not been mapped to any column collects in Unmapped. That is not an error state so much as a prompt: the work is real and has a status, nobody has yet decided where it belongs on the board, and you can map it from the board itself rather than going elsewhere to do it.
If no work states exist at all, the Kanban tab has nothing to draw and says so. Setting them up is an administrator's job.