TaskRay’s Advanced Scheduler: What is it good for? Absolutely, everything! So you may be wondering what Advanced Scheduler is and why you should use it. In my opinion, this is one of our most robust and time-saving features that we have across the board. I’ll tell you more about it.
Before we dive in, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I’ve been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for over 8 years now and have been at TaskRay for about 4.5 years. As a Sr. CSM and Team lead, I have the privilege of working with a lot of our customers to see firsthand how Advanced Scheduler has benefitted end users by streamlining their process all while saving time.
Advanced Scheduler is a feature that comes in our Premium Edition. It first originated when we had a few customers that were spending a lot of time moving around dates in projects. They came to us to see if there was a better way to do this. Their users reported that they were spending about 30 minutes to an hour or more just updating dates and timelines on one project. No big deal, right? Well, it is when you have many many projects with moving timelines to update.
So we thought about it and did some research into solving this problem. We determined that there was definitely a better approach to managing project schedules. As a result, we launched Advanced Scheduler back in the Fall of 2020.
Imagine that you have 10 active projects and the dates are a moving target depending on outside influences. For example, if you are onboarding a customer and they have an internal timeline, materials, and information they need to send to you, then a lot of your timeline is dependent on getting that information from them. Your customer may have internal delays which will cause you to move your timeline around. If this happens on multiple tasks across multiple projects, it very much becomes a time-consuming manual process. With Advanced Scheduler, you can actually move dates across your entire project in a matter of minutes. Normally, in TaskRay there are a few approaches you could take to do this: If you are only changing a few dates, you can push your timeline and the dependencies in the Plan View and it will move the dates accordingly. If your project is dramatically extending or compressing, then you’d have to determine how each individual task in a timeline would need to change to hit your overall completion target. With Advanced Scheduler, you can enter your start and end date, and it will automatically calculate your timeline for you. If a timeline has been shortened, you can also compress a timeline to reflect your new deadline. This allows users to not only save time but to really focus on the work that needs to be done.
A few tips and tricks when using Advanced Scheduler, it’s always a good idea to set a baseline prior to making changes to your schedule. This will allow you to see where your initial project started and what has changed throughout the project lifecycle. This will also give you insights for future planning.
Advanced Scheduler shines when used in conjunction with TaskRay’s On Hold feature. A lot of projects experience delays or holds for many different reasons, by putting a project on hold, you don’t have to chase where your projects are all the time. When they are ready to move off On Hold, you can use Advanced Scheduler to easily update your timeline in a matter of minutes.
If you have a milestone or a Task that you absolutely can not move, you can use the “Exclude from Modifications” functionality to prevent Advanced Scheduler from recalculating the date on that or many tasks that you choose.
For more information, check out our upcoming webinar to see it in action or contact our Customer Success Team at success@taskray.com for questions.
*Advanced Scheduler is available on our Premium Edition. For more information on how to upgrade, please reach out to success@taskray.com
