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 one page with four subjects on the rail down its left side, each split into views along the top. Each answers a different question, and it is worth knowing which answers which, because they overlap less than they look.
| Subject | View | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | Summary | How is this project doing overall? |
| Overview | Health | Which rules decide that, and which tasks are behind them? |
| Work | Timeline | How do the tasks depend on each other, and what is the critical path? |
| Work | List | What work does it consist of, and what state is each piece in? |
| Work | Task board | What is moving right now? |
| Work | Budget | Which tasks are using their budget? |
| Work | Team | Who is on it, and is anybody over capacity? |
| Schedule | Planning board | What is actually scheduled, and what is still unplanned? |
| Schedule | Planned Tasks | Which appointments carry this project's work? |
| Time | What has been logged against it? |
Two are conditional. Timeline appears for projects that are available in the Gantt, and Time only for users who may view timesheets.
The header​
The header names the project and carries its verdict and its status. The status is the project's lane on the project board, defined under work states. With Manage projects it is a dropdown, so you can move the project to another lane, or back to No status, without opening the portfolio. A lane marked as done closes the project, so picking one asks for the same confirmation as closing it. A read-only project takes its status from 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., so there the status is shown but cannot be changed.
On the right sit Layouts, which saves how you arranged the page, and a button to close or reopen the project. On the Work and Schedule subjects there is also a button to maximize the view.
Open and closed​
A closed projectClosed 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. is finished, and its page says so in a banner under the header, with the status it closed under. The whole page becomes read-only: the tasks, the Gantt, the board and the project's details can no longer be changed, its appointments are locked, and no time can be registered on it. Reopen in the banner is the way back, for anybody allowed to close it in the first place.
Closing is done from the header's close button, which asks for confirmation and spells out what will be locked. What closing does and who may do it is the same as on the portfolio, see open and closed projects.
Overview​
The landing subject, and a place to read rather than to work. Its row carries View project details, Edit Project and Refresh.
Summary opens with the verdict under your organization's health rules: On track, At risk or Off track, how many rules fire and which one decides. Below it, one card per area, Schedule, Budget and Resources, each with its headline figure and the rules firing there. Clicking a card opens the Health view at that area. The rail's Overview icon carries a badge with the number of firing rules, colored by the worst of them, so you notice from any subject when something needs a look.
Under the cards sit the working lists:
- Needs attention is the queue of tasks the rules flagged, grouped by what each needs: to be planned, confirmed, rescheduled, unblocked or reconciled. See needs attention.
- The look-ahead lists the open tasks that start, end or fall due in the coming days. Its title follows the range picked beside it, such as Next 7 days, or Upcoming for a custom range.
- Planned / budgeted compares the planned hours with the budget per phase, and Budget burndown draws the budget over time, described under budget and time.
- On the side: the Next milestone, Tasks by work state, the Phases and the Team.
Health is the verdict rule by rule. Each area lists its rules with what the rule read for this project, the threshold it is measured against and whether it fired. A rule that counts tasks offers Show to list them, with a way to locate each one on the board or edit it, and the resource rules offer See workload to open the team's busiest week. Rules switched off for the organization are named in one line at the bottom, so it is clear what is not being watched. The rules themselves are read-only here; an administrator changes them in application setup.
Work​
Timeline​
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.
List​
The work breakdown: every task, its dates, its progress and its state.
Tasks can be created with New task and edited here when your role allows it. A project does not have to originate in the back office 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.
Task board​
The Task board arranges the project's tasks 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 lane on the task or project 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 for the task board, 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 board has nothing to draw and says so. Setting them up is an administrator's job.
Budget and Team​
Budget shows the budget per task, and Team the people on the project, their workload and their skills. Both have their own pages: budget and time and the project team.
Schedule​
The bridge back to the planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline.. The Planning board view shows the project's appointments on a board, with the project's unplanned tasksOpen taskA task that has not been scheduled yet. It waits in the open task list to be placed on the planning board. beside it to drag onto a resource. The toggle on the right switches the board between the project's team and all resources. Planned Tasks lists the appointments that carry the project's work, each one with a way to locate it on the board.
This is where "we agreed to do this, have we actually booked it" gets answered. 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.
Time​
The time logged against the project, by task, by resource or per day, with how far each entry got on its way to the back office. It needs the View timesheets user action, because it shows other people's time. See timesheets.