Two Way Planning
Project Gateway's new Two Way planning feature allows the project manager to work
with the project team in finalizing schedules. Generally this feature is used in the first
20% of the project when both the content and schedule are evolving.
The project manager creates an initial plan and publishes it. Participants can review the plan
and revise the start and finish dates of planned tasks. These user-revised tasks appear in a
special view for quick review by the manager and others. In addition to making schedule
adjustments, repository users can create additional tasks and add participants to the proposed
plan.
An option selection, "Enable Two Way Planning", directs the Project Gateway system to recognize
these adjustments when the project is synchronized back to the PM application.
User revised start dates become start date constraints. User specified end dates are
used to adjust durations. Comments are added to the project plan showing the adjustments
made by the repository users.
This special handling of user changes is done only if the project manager has enabled it. After
recalculation and project review, the revised plan is resynchronized back to the Notes database,
overwriting any user adjustments.
This feature allows the project planner to work with participants in a controlled way to
get the benefit of their expertise in the work being done while remaining firmly in control
of the final project schedule.An additional feature brings short comments from the users back to the project plan,
with each user's name attached.
