As you already know, the release of version 1.4 of the Visual Jobs Scheduler, our add-in for visual project scheduling with NAV, came with lots of new features that, due to the wealth of information, I'm introducing to you step by step. Last week you learned about milestones for better managed project execution and today I continue by describing a function of the Visual Jobs Scheduler that will effectively help you keeping track of the time units consumed for your project - either during the project or after having finished it - and thus letting you promptly intervene if something is not as it should be or analyze where something went wrong.
Besides being a proven tool for simplifying project management by comprehensive functions for resource and capacity planning, Microsoft Dynamic NAV as well offers detailed project tracking for complete overview of current and planned projects. There are lots of evaluation features providing reliable information at every stage of a project thus letting the planner make well-founded decisions.
And great as these lots of evaluation features may be, sometimes they lead to missing the woods for the trees - and here is where the VJS comes in: By providing quick visual overview of information that otherwise has to be reached by opening lots and lots of NAV cards. Or worse - isn't provided at all.
Let's have a look at the Report "Job Actual to Budget", for instance, that shows the scheduled vs. used quantities, but doesn't give more detailed information such as
The Visual Jobs Scheduler offers help in providing all the details needed for analyzing discrepancies between scheduled and used quantities or a posting date being later than the calculated end date by indicating them by colors and symbols. So the planner can see the point where things threaten to get out of hand and react immediately by assigning more/other resources or demand overtime, for instance.
Discrepancies between scheduled and actual usage are indicated in the VJS by according symbols or visual alerts on the basis of resources and the quantities they need for finishing certain tasks.
In combination, the options of time usage with the ones for the posting date can illustrate the following scenarios:
By clicking the according icons, you can hide or show the postings. |
For the sake of an even better overview we have provided a view that directly draws the planner's attention to the posting problems as described above.
This new view is in fact a collapsed Job View that only shows posting problems like described above. We have added a new icon for quickly and comfortably switching to this View.