Team Planner - A Cool New Tool for Assigning Work

One of the most frequent questions I am asked about MS Project 2010 is "Are there any cool features you can tell me about?". The answer, of course is "YES!". There are so many cool new features that in the next few months there will be hundreds of articles, books and training manuals created that will show every feature. The question that I hope to answer is "What are the cool new USEFUL features?".

Now that 2010 has been released to manufacturing and production, I will give you my opinions on new features and how you might use them. There are two that leap out at me that are game changers: Manual Scheduling and the Team Planner.

Manual Scheduling allows you to create and schedule tasks and resources without the interference of MS Project's scheduling engine. This means that Project won't be second guessing the starting and ending dates when you enter a task.

The Team Planner works with Manual Scheduling to allow you to assign tasks to a resource in a timeline. The Team Planner also shows work assigned to other resources. Work is assigned and moved by clicking and dragging it to the time period you want.

The Team Planner is the resource driven tool for scheduling work. (click on image to enlarge)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Gantt Chart is the task driven tool for scheduling work. (click on image to enlarge)

 
 
 
 
 

Now you can schedule work YOUR way!