Schedule Scenarios Overview

Schedule scenarios allow you to analyze and adjust a what-if version of your schedule without affecting your current schedule. With schedule scenarios, you can create and manage multiple planning schedules, modifying details as you evaluate and anticipate different situations, project conditions, resource and role requirements, response plans, delays, and other project issues. You can modify most of the data in a scenario as you would the data in the current schedule. You can use schedule scenarios to see how a given outcome may affect your project without making permanent changes to the actual schedule. When creating a scenario, you can set the source of the scenario's data to be the current schedule, an existing scenario, or an existing baseline. The data from the source is copied to the new scenario. This enables you to perform what-if planning on different instances of your project schedule.

The data stored by a scenario is unique to that scenario. For example, actions such as creating or updating activity data, scheduling activities, leveling resources and roles, and using the schedule health check tool do not affect the current schedule, other scenarios, or schedule baselines. If you want changes made in the scenario to replace the data in the current schedule, you can set the scenario as the current schedule.

Active scenarios that are currently being planned have a status of What-if. Scenarios you choose to close have a status of Closed. After a current schedule is replaced with a scenario, the statuses of the previous schedule and the scenario are changed to Retired. You cannot delete retired scenarios.