Why MSP project timelines drift
MSP projects share engineers with the service desk. A priority-one ticket pulls someone off a migration for a day, a customer moves the change window, a vendor ships the hardware a week late. None of that is unusual. What turns it into a missed go-live is a plan nobody updated.
A timeline drawn once in a separate tool goes stale within a week, because the updates happen in Autotask: task statuses, dates and time entries. A timeline drawn from the Autotask data stays current because there is nothing to copy across.
The project timeline
Each project’s timeline groups tasks under their phases, with each phase’s estimated and logged hours. Task bars run from the Autotask start date to the end date. Dependencies come from Autotask task predecessors and are drawn as arrows.
Drag a bar to move a task, or drag its end to change its length, and ProjectSmith writes the new dates to Autotask and reads the task back. If a predecessor now ends after the task that depends on it starts, the arrow turns to a warning colour and the clash is listed. Nothing moves on its own. Choose Shift successors on a clash and ProjectSmith moves the dependent tasks, up to 25 of them, to start once their predecessors finish, keeping each task’s length, and writes their new dates to Autotask. Tasks already done never move.
Dependencies you add in ProjectSmith are written to Autotask as task predecessors, within the same project, so people working in Autotask see them too.
The portfolio timeline
The portfolio puts every project on one timeline: a bar from start to target end, coloured by Autotask project status, with a line for today. Open projects past their target date are flagged, and projects with no dates are listed underneath so an unscheduled job still gets seen. Filter by project status and by project manager.
The portfolio is a read view. It changes nothing in Autotask, and it needs a Planner seat.
Using the Gantt in a weekly planning meeting
A routine for the weekly planning meeting:
- Open the portfolio and look for red: open projects past their target date, and two cutovers booked into the same week.
- For each one, open the project timeline and read the dependency warnings. Most slips start with one late predecessor.
- Check the people on those tasks in capacity planning. A date only holds if someone has the hours.
- Decide: move the dates, move the people, or tell the customer. Drag the bars or shift successors while you are in the meeting, so Autotask is right before everyone leaves.
What it reads and writes
| Reads from Autotask | Writes to Autotask |
|---|---|
| Projects, their status and dates | Nothing from the portfolio |
| Phases and tasks, with start and end dates | Task start and end dates, when you drag a bar or shift successors |
| Task predecessors | Predecessors you add, and the removal of one you delete |