Manage and Review Project Suggestions

As team members start making suggestions to your project plan, as a project manager (PM) you need to be able to understand these and quickly, securely and easily update the plan. LiveProject is equipped with powerful features to save time and minimize cut-and-paste errors in this process.

Suggestions are managed in the "Manage Project Suggestions" tab in LiveProject. The manager of a project will be notified of pending suggestions either by a notification and/or a sound, but always through the icon in his task-bar.

The project manager can choose from a list of projects with outstanding suggestions. Once selected, all pending suggestions for the selected project are highlighted. LiveProject automatically includes all columns and all tasks with pending suggestions. This makes it very quick for the project manager to get an overview of all every suggestion made.

Each suggestion can be edited individually and approved or rejected field-by-field. Most commonly, the manager will reject or accept all pending suggestions at once. This can be done with one click, making the process as easy as possible.

In some cases, there may be conflicting changes, for instance, if two users edit the same task or if a suggestion is made to a task that has been deleted. LiveProject handles all conflicts and allows the manager to resolve them with just a few clicks.

Once the manager has made his decision about the suggestions, she will let LiveProject update the MS project file (.mpp file). It automatically opens the mpp file, makes the changes requested and saves the file again. It then prompts the manager to publish the file to the LiveProject Server. Once that is done, each team member's LiveProject automatically updates to show the new version. Pending suggestions are cleared and recent changes in the project are highlighted.

LiveProject enables the project manager to operate directly in the context of the project plan itself, minimizing the workload of updating the plans and freeing up time for more important tasks.