Have you noticed the major upgrade to Scheduling rolling out? If you already use Forecast, you most likely have. It’s a significant improvement to what was our first iteration of an organization- and project-wide schedule to combine everything in one single manageable view.
However, as time goes, things grow old. It was time for an upgrade; we heard it from you, and we felt it internally. So, there was the release of the all-new Scheduling.
Now, combined with this new improved design, feel, and functionality of the new scheduling; we took the opportunity to use some of the same technology to enhance other features related to or using some of the same functionality. Thus, this post will feature three new things that you may not have noticed yet, but that may likewise significantly improve your workflow.
Connected Projects Timeline
The first upgraded feature you may have missed is the Connected Projects Timeline. Now, if you don’t know what a Connected Project is, read more here, but it’s basically a way to link several smaller projects into one wholeness to create a better perspective of the progress.
One way to get this better perspective of the whole is through the Timeline. This might remind you of a Gantt chart because indeed, it is very similar. The timeline allows you to take a step back from within the project and view every single connected piece of it in a single view. You can drag things around to adjust start- and end dates, you can click project titles to see the current project capacity in terms of allocated roles, and you can view all the milestones and tasks under each project to see exactly what’s in the making right now - and also very important, the progress of each.
As your project progresses, you’ll see each block on the timeline fill up with vibrant colors and you’ll begin to see the end of your project.
Timeline from Scheduling
Now, this one is linked with the new Scheduling as you may already have explored a bit. However, you may still not have experienced it fully in all its gloriousness… ;) We thought, why not take the Gantt chart, the Timeline as mentioned above, one step further and build it straight into the organization’s scheduling. Providing you with a cross-project timeline for all of your projects.
You can gradually expand projects to see milestones, tasks, and team members attached to each, or keep the view clean on a project level. It brings you a visual representation of each project’s progress as shown through an increasingly more vibrant timeline block and more specifically through a percentage of completion for each project. The same goes if you expand the view into milestones and tasks.
Similar to the Connected Projects Timeline, you can likewise click a project title to view the current project capacity and drag projects, milestones, and tasks around to adjust the duration and time of each block. Changes will be saved and updated in real-time.
Holidays Calendar
The last feature we pull from our hat today is a widely requested Holidays Calendar. Yes, it is now possible to import holidays straight into Forecast. You have two options. Either you can import a set of official national holidays from our database based on country. Or alternatively, you can add and define holidays manually yourself. Of course, you also have the option to mix and match as you’d like.
You can have multiple holidays calendars added to your account, but only the ‘Default’ holidays calendar will be shown in Scheduling. In Scheduling, holidays will show up as a block on the timeline under non-project time on each person in your People view. Also, Forecast will automatically allocate all team members to a full day off on the holiday.
So, now you can see both work and holidays directly in your schedule. Once again, we're improving the perspective and insight into your organization.
