Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Kenny. I'm with Structured Solutions, and today I'm really excited to show you a new groundbreaking feature that's going to be added to SSI Tools that I think can really change how teams use Microsoft Project and gives the ability to have multiple people access and edit a project file at the same time. We call this new feature our Change Tracking Tools. So I'm going to get into Microsoft Project and show you how they work, and then at the end of the video I'll walk through a couple different scenarios on how these tools could be useful to you and your team. Okay, so here I am in Microsoft Project. The new SSI Change Tracking Tools will be located all the way on the right-hand side of the SSI Tools ribbon just to the right of the Multi-Project Tools group. These tools will allow you to either record changes in the same way that you would record a macro in Microsoft Project or Excel, or import changes that someone else has already recorded. So I'm going to start by recording some changes that I'm going to make in this example project file that I have open. To do this, I'm going to click the Record Changes button. As soon as I click on that, a form is going to open up asking me to confirm my options before recording begins. There's a couple really important options that you'll want to know in here. Most important is which field is being used as what we call the Tracking Unique ID field. This is just whatever field in the project that is going to be unique for every single task. If you're working in a multi-project environment and stitching all those multi-projects together into a master project file, this may not actually be the Unique ID field. It may be some text field that has a formula in it. In the case of my project, I'm going to keep this set to Unique ID. Then there's all sorts of options on what you would like the tool to actually record, such as tasks that are deleted, tasks that are added, changes to fields, changes to dependencies. You can choose whatever you would like to record, and if there are any specific fields that you want to ignore changes into. Once I'm happy with all my options, I'll just click the button that says Start Recording. I'm going to get a pop-up that says these settings will be saved at the project level, and so I have the option to choose whether or not I want to save the project right now. I'm going to say no to this prompt. Now you can see by looking at the button up here that changes are being recorded. So any change that I make to tasks within my schedule right now is going to be captured by the Change Recorder tool. So if I do something like change the name of my Preliminary Design Review milestone to be something like PDR Complete, and if I scroll down here and perhaps change this task duration from 20 days to 30 days, those are changes that will be captured by the tool for me. In fact, I can see all the changes that are captured by the tool by going to the button just to the right of the recording button, clicking that, which will open up a menu, then clicking the button that says Open Details Pane. This will show me all changes that have occurred so far. So you can see that I changed the name of Task Unique ID number 6 from Preliminary Design Review to just PDR Complete, and I changed the duration on Unique ID 39 from 20 days to 30 days. There's all sorts of other changes that I could do in this project, such as I could delete tasks, I could add new tasks, I could change dependencies, I could do things like add or remove predecessors or successors. Notice that as I've been making these changes, this button here has lit up and it has started to spin. This is the Change Recorder tool telling me that it knows that there are changes, and if I click this button, it will refresh this view here to show me any changes that have been made to this file. When I'm ready to stop recording changes, I can either click this recording button in the Change Tracking Details Pane, or I can come back up to the original button that I clicked and click Stop Recording. As soon as I stop recording, SSI Tools is going to ask me if I'd like to download the current change log. I'm going to say yes to this, and you can see now I have a new file, which is .TCS, that stands for Tracked Changes, that can then be used by someone else to import and replicate these exact same changes that I made in this file. So I'm going to go ahead and close this project file without saving it, and I'm going to reopen it without any of those changes that I made. Notice here the milestone called Preliminary Design Review is not called PDR Complete like I changed it to. There was another task which duration I changed from 20 days to 30 days. There were some predecessors and successors that I edited on a task. There were a couple tasks that I deleted, and there was a task that I had added here. So now if I want to automatically replicate those changes that were made, I can come over here and click the button that says Import Changes. This will open up the SSI Change Importer Pane. The first page on this pane is going to prompt me to adjust my settings for import, so what things do we want to import, what field in our project is used as the unique ID field, are there any fields that we want to ignore changes. Whatever you decide is up to you. I'll click Accept Settings here. Once again SSI Tools is going to let me know that these settings are saved at the project level. It's going to give me an option to save the project. Now I'll say no to this. Now I just need to browse to that change tracking file. I have that file right here. I'm going to click on that, and you can see that what I'm seeing now is some information up at the top here showing me the project that was recorded, the author of the changes, and the time that these changes were published. Down here in the bottom section, I can see all of those changes that were made, but this looks slightly different from the view that I was looking at earlier. You can see I get another column here that shows status that tells me whether or not the changes have been accepted yet, and I have a little check box by each row here which will allow me to pick and choose what changes I want to accept and which changes I don't. When I'm happy with that, in order to import these changes automatically, recreate them, I'll just click the button that says accept checked changes. This will take all the changes that are currently checked and automatically replicate them. And let's just take a look at our project file now to see what's been done. Notice that this milestone is now called PDR complete. Notice that there was a task that was added which is called test one right here. There was a couple tasks that were deleted. There was a task which duration was changed from 20 days to 30 days, unique ID 39. Let's check that out. And task unique ID 73 had a couple changes made to its predecessors and successors. So there was a predecessor that was added to it and the successor was changed to a start to start relationship. Let me show you one other way that I could import these changes. I'm going to close Microsoft Project entirely and reopen it. I'm going to go back to the same project file. Once again, I haven't saved any of the changes that I've made to this project file yet, so each time I'm opening it, it's as if none of those changes have been made. I'm going to go back to the SSI tools tab, click the button to import changes, go through my settings one more time, grab my tracked changes file, and this time instead of just clicking the button to accept all the tracked changes or all the checked changes, I should say, I'm going to click the button that says step through changes. Now what I'm going to be able to do is walk through these changes one at a time and either accept or reject them. So if I click the accept button here, what's going to happen is a task unique ID 67 is going to be deleted from the project. I'll accept and you'll see that that task is gone. I'll move on to the next change and this is telling me that task unique ID 68 is going to be deleted. I'll accept that. Now I'm going to add a new task called test one into the project. I'm going to change the duration of that from one day to 10 days. I'm going to change the name of preliminary design review to PDR complete. So you can see these changes happening. I'm just walking through the changes one at a time here. So this can be useful if you really want to see and analyze what those changes are before you accept them. So let me talk through a couple different scenarios now where these tools may be useful to your team. First, let's imagine that you have a large project file and it's just a single file and you want to have multiple people editing that file at the same time. Well, Microsoft Project doesn't have any good way to allow multiple people to access a file at the same time, but with these change tracking tools what you can do is you can take the kind of live working file and you can save copies of it and then you can distribute those copies of the file to different team members and they can go through and they can make changes into that file and they can record those changes as they go. Then what can happen is they can take all those changes into their track change file and those can be imported automatically into the real live master file. So essentially you can have multiple people working on the same project file all at once and it gives the master level scheduler ultimate change control to decide what things are going to be accepted and what things will be rejected, which I think is even better than just having multiple people access a file at the same time. Here's another scenario. Let's say that you're working in a multi-project environment where you have multiple sub-project files that get connected together into a single integrated master file and then that master file is reviewed at meetings with the project manager and other project stakeholders. The driving paths of things are reviewed, the durations of things are reviewed, perhaps tasks are edited, predecessor and successor relationships are changed, maybe tasks are deleted or added. Those can all be recorded from the master project file. The sub-project owners can then take the tracked changes file and import all those changes that are pertinent to their sub-project. A couple other examples. Let's say that you are trying to conduct status for your project file, a monthly status cycle, and you have one stubborn task manager who says I'm not going to give you my status inputs in that excel spreadsheet that you're giving me, just give me a copy of the project file and I'll make my changes in there. Well we normally don't want to allow anyone who's not professionally trained in Microsoft Project to just edit the project file, but with this tool that person can go into a copy of the project file and record those changes and then the master scheduler can take their track change file and decide what to import and what not to import in a way that's not going to harm the project file. One other scenario that I'll give you is that these tools can be a great training resource. A lot of times when you bring on junior level schedulers onto projects you don't really want them editing the project file right away. Because of the nature of these project files and of these contracts it's very important that we keep the integrity of our project files at a very high level. We maintain good quality control. So oftentimes for a new person it's hard to allow them to really get into the project file and start making changes because we don't know if they know all the do's and don'ts yet. Well with the change recording tools, now instead of having that person just shadow a more senior level person, we can give them actual work to do in the project file and they can just record changes in that project file and those change tracking files can be sent to the more senior level scheduler who can then walk through those changes with them, tell them what they did right, what they did wrong, and it will be a great learning experience for the new person. So these are just some of the ways that you can use the new SSI change tracking tools. I really think that these are going to be a game-changing tools for anyone using Microsoft Project and I look forward to you utilizing them for yourself and your own team. Look forward to these tools coming out in the next release of SSI Tools. Thanks everyone. Bye.