Can you prevent tasks in Subprojects from being updated when a Master Project is Autoscheduled?

Products

• Clarity PPM SaaS
• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

Can you prevent tasks in subprojects from being updated when a master project is Autoscheduled?

Environment

Release: 16.0.1 
Component: ODPRM

Resolution

There are multiple ways to prevent the entire subproject from being rescheduled or selected tasks within the subprojects. 

1. From within the specific Master Project, in Classic PPM, mark the Subproject Read-Only 
2. From within the Subproject, in Classic PPM or Modern UX, mark selected Tasks 'Locked' 

  

Classic PPM

  

From within the Master Project, mark the Subproject Read-Only

• In Classic PPM, you can prevent tasks from being changed in a subproject during publishing of a schedule by making the subproject read only in the master project:
  1. Navigate to the Master Project, select the 'Properties' Tab drop-down then 'Subprojects' 
  2. Check the check box next to the subproject and then click the 'Set Read-Only' button 

   

From within the Subproject, mark selected Tasks 'Locked'

To prevent a subproject's tasks from changing in a tentative schedule is to lock the tasks by one of the below methods:

Locking tasks directly prevent them from being auto-scheduled in any situation.

• Option 1: Check the 'Exclude from Autoscheduling' checkbox on the task
  
  1. In Classic PPM, navigate to the subproject
  2. Click on the Tasks Tab and click on the hyperlink to open the Tasks Properties page 
  3. Click the 'Exclude from Autoscheduling' checkbox 

• Option 2: Check the lock tasks checkbox
• This can be done from the Task list or the Gantt PPM List views. 
  1. Open a  project and click the Tasks tab 
  2. Click 'Open in Scheduler' then 'Gantt' 
  3. In the Gantt View, click Options then Configure 
  4. Configure the page to add the Locked field to the list 
  5. For each task, set the Locked value to Yes 

  

Modern UX

Locking tasks directly prevent them from being auto-scheduled in any situation.

• For updating a single or a few tasks:
  1. Open a project and click the TASKS Module 
  2. Configure the Grid Layout to include the 'Locked' column 
  3. Locate the task row and update the checkbox to 'lock' it from being autoscheduled 
• Optionally, you can do this using the Bulk Edit capability  
  1. Filter for regular tasks (not milestones, not phases or activities) by using 'Is Task' = Yes, Milestone = No 
  2. At the top of the grid, Select All or manually check rows of tasks that you want to update 
  3. Click the 'Edit' button at the top of the grid to show the Bulk Edit Modal 
  4. Check the box for the 'Locked' field and Save the update 

 

Additional Information

The ability to use Autoschedule in Modern UX for Projects has been introduced in Release 16.0.1 

When auto-scheduling a master project in Gantt with a subproject set as read-only, you get the following alert:

The following subprojects are already locked, marked read-only, or you don't have rights to change them. If you create a tentative schedule now, changes to the tentative schedule for those subprojects will not be able to be published back to the plan of record. Do you still want to continue?

If you decide to continue along with the auto-scheduling action, Gantt will show the new proposed dates and while the tentative schedule is on Clarity will also move the dates accordingly.

However, at publishing time, as the alert states, the changes will not be saved and the dates will be reverted back to the original state.

Even if the behavior might look confusing, the alert was introduced to get users aware of it