Editing What-if Scenarios
Shifting Projects/Proposals or Roles/Resources
You can shift projects, proposals, roles, or resources from the What-if tab on the What-if View Scenarios screen. Shifting projects/proposals allows you to dynamically see the roles/resource availability impact based on the shift. If a role’s (e.g. QA Engineer) available capacity for one particular week is low, then shifting the project start date by a week could help free up the capacity of that role.
- Select the scenario you are working on from the Select Scenario drop-down menu.
- From the Edit menu select What-if to begin editing the What-if tab.
- Ensure that you have a date range set in the filters for which your projects in the (upper) What-if grid has efforts associated with it (not all zeros). In the lower Grid, you can then see the resources and their effort, availability, and utilization (as set up by your filters).
- From the top grid select the project/proposal or resource/role and enter the number of weeks or months under the Shift column. The change is immediately reflected in the table below. Shifts are integer units of months or weeks based on the column display set in the Filter. The project shift is absolute and always based on the start date. Role shifts are based on top of project shifts.
- After you have finished making changes you can save the scenario by selecting Scenario > Save. You can also make a copy of these changes into a separate scenario using the Save As option (Scenario > Save As).
Excluding/Including Projects or Proposals
You can quickly exclude or include projects based on the evaluation score of projects/proposals. The least important projects/proposals can be excluded to ensure resources are available for more important projects/proposals.
- Select the scenario you are working on from the Select Scenario drop-down menu.
- From the Edit menu select What-if to begin editing the What-if tab.
- In the lower Grid, you can then see the Resources and their Effort, Availability, Utilization (as set up by the filters). Look for a resource that is over-utilized – either with the utilization showing red or the Availability showing red. Now expand on that user to see what projects are causing the Red over-utilization.
- From the upper grid manipulate that project by checking the Exclude column. You will see that this project and all its associated effort is grayed and italicized to show exclusion. The lower grid will immediately reflect the change.
- After you have finished making changes you can save the scenario by selecting Scenario > Save. You can also make a copy of these changes into a separate scenario using the Save As option (Scenario > Save As).
Editing Hours
You can edit the resource hours within the grid to quickly see if there will be a resource impact and to see if there is enough capacity available for the time frame of interest.
- Select the scenario you are working on from the Select Scenario drop-down menu.
- From the Edit menu select What-if to begin editing the What-if tab.
- In the lower Grid, you can then see the Resources and their Effort, Availability, Utilization (as set up by the filters). Look for a resource that is over-utilized – either with the utilization showing red or the Availability showing red.
- From the top grid select the resource and change the effort associated with this resource for a selected timeframe. The grid below shows the impact in real time.
- After you have finished making changes you can save the scenario by selecting Scenario > Save. You can also make a copy of these changes into a separate scenario using the Save As option (Scenario > Save As).
What-if
Using What-if Planning
Creating a Scenario