Automatically scheduling a Change

You can schedule a Change automatically by using the critical path method (CPM) that is provided by the Graphical Scheduling application. If the CPM finds a schedule for all tasks that does not violate any resource constraints, you can save and commit the schedule, and your scheduling operation is completed. If no schedule is found automatically, you can manually schedule individual tasks.

To schedule all of the tasks automatically, click () in the toolbar.

If you set a Start Date on the Schedule tab of the Change, the CPM uses this time as the starting point for its calculations; it picks the first available time slot after that date. If you do not set a Start Date (the default), the CPM starts with the current date.

Depending on the result of the CPM operation, one of the following occurs:

• If the CPM successfully finds a scheduling solution, all of the task bars are displayed in blue in the calendar of the Gantt view. In addition, all of the tasks are displayed as green task bars within unshaded, or available, time slots in the Resource Constraints timeline.
• If there are no available time slots following the calculation start date, an error message identifies the task or tasks that could not be scheduled and explains that there are no available resource constraints.
• If the estimated duration of a task is too long to fit within an available time window, an error message identifies the task and explains that the task does not fit in any of the available time slots.

If the CPM is not able to automatically find a schedule for the entire Change, you can perform a variety of operations to manually schedule the Change. You perform manual scheduling on a task-by-task basis.