Skip to main content
Planview Customer Success Center

Project Planning Worksheet (PPW): Best practices

For the best results when using PPW, the following best practices are strongly recommended.

Add only the required resources to your preferred resources list

It is not good practice to add all of the resources in your organization to your preferred resources. Add only the resources that you assign to tasks regularly. A long list of preferred resources increases the loading time of because the nonworking days data for each resource is preloaded.

Use task assignment views for detailed assignment work

It is best to use a task assignment view for doing detailed work such as the following:

  • manually distributing effort to daily or fiscal periods
  • using different loading methods for assignments for the same task
  • assigning different planned start and planned finish dates to different resources who are assigned to the same task.
  • adding additional resources to a task once one or more of the previous points apply to it

Limit the length of task durations

Limit the length of task durations, ideally to a year or less. It is not good practice to have an open task with a duration that spans many years. The nonworking day information is preloaded for each task based on the date range within the worksheet. Tasks that have long durations require years of data to be preloaded.

Limit the number of tasks, and resources assigned to a task

Keep the number of tasks within a project, and the number of assignments for each task to a reasonable level. Having a single open task that hundreds or thousands of resources enter time for can cause serious performance issues in . If you use open tasks for year-long activities such as training and development, non-billablenon-chargeable work, or meetings, consider doing the following:

  • creating a new project for each fiscal year
  • creating separate projects for different parts of the organization
  • restricting access to open tasks by workgroups or functions

Keep projects at a manageable size

Keep project size from 400 – 1200 task or task assignment rows, and do not have more than 100 rows under any given level.

Create at least three levels of hierarchy in projects

Projects with a flat list of tasks are difficult to manage and take longer to be displayed in because all of the tasks must be displayed each time you access the worksheet. In contrast, when the tasks in a project are organized in a hierarchy, you can expand and collapse sections to focus on the data that you need to modify.

Grant "view project" access to summary task managers

Grant View project access to summary task managers so that they can view the entire project in . Otherwise summary task managers can only view the tasks under their summary tasks, and if they make changes, the values will be rolled up to include only the amounts from their summary tasks and not the project totals.

Avoid saving the worksheet frequently

Doing work in batches and then saving will result in better performance and less waiting.

Use Firefox or Chrome browsers

The Firefox and Chrome browsers are recommended, especially to perform actions such as copying and pasting many tasks at once. Firefox and Chrome are more efficient at processing data than other browsers.

Do not access different versions of Changepoint at the same time

If you have access to different versions of Changepoint for example, in test and production environments, do not access them at the same time because you might encounter issues due to the caching of files. Ensure that you clear your browser cache before signing into a different environment.