Team Planner fixed in Project 2013

The Team Planner view was introduced in Microsoft Project Professional 2010, (it’s not available in Project Standard). This view allows a user to visualize assignments within a project schedule and is particularly useful for visualizing overallocations within your project team.

Last week while teaching our ‘EPMA 100’ – Managing Projects with Microsoft Project 2013 course, I had one of my “oh cool, I just learned something” moments. I was demonstrating the ‘Team Planner’ view to the class and explaining the caveats of using the ‘drag and drop’ feature to push work out to available dates, and reassigning work to alternative resources. I noticed that one of the annoying features that I found in Project 2010 was no longer present.

When rescheduling work to an available date in both Project 2010 and 2013, the tool uses constraints to push the work out. In Project 2010, when reassigning work to an available resource (not adjusting the ‘Start’ and ‘Finish’ dates of the task), the team planner view would apply a ‘Start No Earlier Than’ scheduling constraint which is the same as the task’s start date. This is totally unnecessary as we are not trying to override the start date of the task. For this reason, I have always recommended that users not to use the team planner view to reassign work but to just use it as a reference. However, in Project 2013 you can reassign tasks to alternative resources using the team planner view and no scheduling constraints will be applied (unless you adjust the dates). This is another reason that you may wish to Upgrade to Project Server 2013, give us a call!