We’ve considered three great reasons to upgrade to Project 2007 so far in this series of articles: Multiple undo and redo, Change Highlighting and Cost and Budget resources. In this article I’ll examine another valuable addition to the latest version of Project: Task drivers.

A number of factors come into play when scheduling tasks. Task scheduling is defined by resource assignments, calendars, constraints and predecessors. It can take a lot of time to analyze and troubleshoot a schedule, so any tool that helps figure out a scheduling problem is of high value. The Microsoft Project team has delivered just such a tool with Task Drivers.

Before you can use it, you have to turn it on. Here’s how:

Open your project file.
From the menu choose Project and then Task Drivers. (See Figure 1.)
Click on a task.

The Task Drivers pane will appear on the left side of your project and display what factors are affecting the timing of the task you selected.

Figure 1: Turning on the Task Drivers Pane.