ProjectWork news

New demo videos are recorded that show the functionality of ProjectWork. They are screen recordings with a natural-sounding artificial voice giving explanations. Four videos are available now on YouTube for you and your team: install in Google Drive, plan with tasks, track project and plan with resources.

The videos are listed on a support page, where each video has a link to the total video or to the subject you are looking for in the video. More videos will come with Business version specific functions.

In ProjectWork for Business, a function has been added to post a message from an opened project schedule in a Google Chat space or Slack channel. A link to this schedule is included in the message with its view if desired, such as a selected task and the time scale of the Gantt. Information belonging to the project, such as the description, can also be added to the message. This function is intended to centralize communication about one or more projects.

The function is in the ProjectWork for Business menu and opens a dialog. The connection to a Google Chat space or Slack channel is done using a webhook URL which is created once in the relevant room or channel and stored in the dialog. A Google Chat space is only available to Google work or school accounts. In the dialog there is a circled i that links to the manual.

In ProjectWork for Business the action to save edits and views has been split. The saving of edits remains automatic to keep the schedule the same for all users. Saving the view is now a manual action so each user has their own view, like with expand/collapse or filter, without disturbing others who are working in the same file.

The button to save the view appears below the file name as soon as you change the view. Using the button saves the view in the schedule file and synchronizes the view for all active users. Without saving the view, you keep the common view when you re-open the file.

In ProjectWork for Business you can use a clipboard to copy parts of a schedule and then paste it into the same schedule or one of your other schedules. The clipboard is overwritten every time a new copy is performed and the clipboard will be cleared over time. A new function Save clipboard... has therefore been added to the Tasks menu which opens a popup dialog to save the present tasks on the clipboard and put them back to the clipboard later.

The saved tasks can serve as building blocks for quick and uniform planning. The clipboard tasks are saved in the schedule and can be copied along, so that a planning can serve as a template with building blocks. With the Paste options... function you can scale a building block to the task duration you want.

In ProjectWork for Business you can now open a Copy/Paste options dialog in the Tasks and Resources menu to select what information you like to paste from copied tasks or resources on the clipboard. Tasks and resources can have their color, yellow note and attached Drive documents optionally pasted or not. When you copy tasks or resources from another schedule, custom columns can be optionally pasted to the schedule. The paste options are useful when you copy from a template file.

Tasks have options to paste assigned resources and predecessor links from a copied clipboard or not. Tasks also have the option to repeat the pasting and multiply the duration to plan for example a roll-out.

When you cut instead of copy tasks or resources to the clipboard, the paste options are ignored and all information is pasted.

ProjectWork uses The Critical Path Method (CPM) to calculate the shortest schedule, taking into account links between tasks. Each task has an earliest start date and a latest start date, the duration between these dates is the slack. Tasks on the so-called critical path have a slack of zero, their delay will cause the project to delay.

ProjectWork has a new option in the Settings dialog to indicate the slack duration of each task in the Gantt chart with a dotted bar. This is in addition to the indication of the critical path in the Gantt chart with red task bar borders and red links between them. The slack duration is also visible in the Slack column in the tasks table.

The Columns dialog is opened when you click on the table header in the Tasks or Resources panel or from their menus. Custom columns get a name and type like text, date, amount when added. Their position and visibility can be changed like the default columns.

A new type options has been introduced to add a column with dropdown list and options. The advantage over a text column is that the entry is faster by mouse clicking an option. The entries are without typos which avoids problems when you generate a report by publishing the schedule as a spreadsheet and use a custom column value to for instance filter tasks.

You can now highlight a selected task description from a set of colors in the details panel. The meaning of the color depends on the user, like highlighting milestones or critical tasks that are at risk of slipping. So it would be helpful, especially when presenting to others, to be able to highlight tasks. All highlighted tasks can be filtered from the Tasks menu.

In ProjectWork for Business you can now set the schedule as a baseline (ProjectWork for Business menu > Baselines...). This means a copy is made of the schedule (tasks and resources) which you can use as a reference after for example a milestone. You can save and view multiple baselines and monitor the difference with the actual schedule. The Project Status report (ProjectWork menu > Report > Project status...) includes the latest baseline and the actual schedule for comparison. When you make a copy of the schedule file you have the option to include the baseline(s) or not.

ProjectWork consists of 5 panels, from left to right: Capacity, Resources, Project, Tasks and Gantt. The Capacity and Gantt panels contain charts, the Resources and Tasks panels contain tables, the Project panel can contain task or resource details. Showing Resources and Tasks simultaneously gives a instant overview of how they are assigned. The Capacity and Gantt chart rows correspond to the Resources and Tasks table respectively. Panels can be hidden to give other panels more space. Three new panel views are showing only Resources or Tasks to show as many columns as possible without scrolling or all panels at once to have a complete overview.

For some product developments, incremental Sprints, as used by the Scrum framework, are useful. During the Sprint planning event, at the start of a Sprint, Product backlog items are selected for the Sprint. You can maintain the Product backlog in ProjectWork, including detail work. Product items are assigned to a new Sprint resource type. The Product backlog schedule can be filtered to show only the specific Sprint items with their detailed work, the rest collapsed. Work, progress, and costs of a Sprint are added together with a Sprint resource.

A template schedule allows you to save time and create uniformity when new projects make a copy from it. You make a copy in the ProjectWork menu, see the Manual. ProjectWork allows you to publish a spreadsheet from a schedule, modify the layout or extend it with calculations and charts, and keep it synchronized to the schedule. You can now also copy the published spreadsheet from the template and attach it to the copied schedule, preserving the modifications and extensions. The same applies to the link to the dashboard spreadsheet which can also be copied from the template.

When carrying out multiple projects, it is useful to track their progress centrally. You can now create a new dashboard or add your project to an existing dashboard from a Business project schedule. The dashboard is a Google spreadsheet in Google Drive that you can insert into Google Sites, for example. The projects are arranged row by row, with information in columns. The projects are visible in the spreadsheet in a Gantt chart. You can adjust this spreadsheet to your liking, see the Manual. You can find the dashboard dialog in the ProjectWork for Business menu under Report > Dashboard.... A project in the dashboard can be updated from the same dialog.

Leveling a schedule with lots of resources and many tasks that overlap to a compact result may take minutes. You will now first get an estimate of the calculation time. If you agree, you will receive a percentage indication of the progress. Any other editors having the schedule open will also see the progress. You cannot make any changes to the schedule during progress.

The sorting of tasks by start or finish date has been extended to more columns. The sorting of resources is now also possible. The columns are under Sort down and Sort up in the Tasks and Resources menu. Both keep the WBS structure intact of the selected tasks or resources that you sort. Remember that sorting is final, as opposed to showing certain tasks. Immediately after sorting it can be undone (Ctrl+Z).

The publish to a spreadsheet in the ProjectWork for Business menu has been extended with a function to update a published spreadsheet with the actual schedule. Columns, calculations and comments added to the spreadsheet are kept unchanged. Diagrams linked to tasks and resources are updated. An example report is to copy columns as a baseline and calculate the difference with the updated schedule.

The Assistance popup in ProjectWork helps you getting familiar quickly. It gives alerts to new messages like this one, tips on functions to use and links to general information. When you open ProjectWork while there is a new message, the Assistance popup will show. You can see the popup whenever you want by clicking on Assistance in the central ProjectWork panel. New tips appear at each opening.

If you assign a resource to tasks that overlap in time, the capacity of a resource can exceed 100%. This can be solved by starting certain tasks later so that they do not overlap anymore. This is a time-consuming manual task, which ProjectWork for Business can now carry out automatically.

For tasks that start later, after resource leveling, the leveling must be removed explicitly in order to start earlier again. This can be done for all assignments simultaneously or per selected resource or task.

In Settings it is possible to set whether tasks in the past or that are 100% complete should also be leveled.

Tasks in a project may depend on each other. In the planning, this means that they are linked. For example, you link the end of a task to the beginning of a subsequent task.

With lag and lead the next task starts later or earlier. You plan this with an extra time indication behind the link, where a positive indication leads to a delay and a negative to an overlap. A task with predecessor link 7GB-2d indicates that this task starts 2 days earlier than the start of task 7.

Google has added shared drives to Google Drive. Instead of individual users a team is the owner of documents. The members of a team can change over time without the need to transfer ownership per document. This feature is available in Google Workspace Enterprise, Google Workspace Business and Google Workspace Education, so not in Google Workspace Basic or the free Google Drive.

A shared drive can be useful for a project to keep all documents including the schedule together. Therefore ProjectWork for Business now supports shared drives when available in your Google Drive version. You can open ProjectWork files in Google shared drive or in ProjectWork file picker under the new shared drive tab. ProjectWork Resource Manager can be used with shared drive when the resource and project files are in the same shared drive folder.

Collaboration in real-time means that if you open a ProjectWork file and co-workers open the same file, all can make changes in the same schedule and see it updated. This was always possible with ProjectWork, but what has improved?

• The co-workers are shown, as well as their coming and going into the session.
• Changes are indicated per cell rather than per row. You do not only see your own changes highlighted, but also from the co-workers.
• Performance has improved, changes appear quicker.

Enjoy the improvements to make accurate schedules together.