Team Use - Earned Value Only

If your project team is small (only a few people), and you only need to manage project cost and schedule, you can use the Earned Value Collaboration Features that are built in to the dashboard to generate a rolled-up earned value schedule. This functionality is described in the "Task & Schedule Collaboration" help topic.

The main advantage of this approach is that it is fairly simple to use: graphical user interfaces are provided to walk you through the steps involved in rolling up an earned value schedule. This approach works well for small teams, and is very useful for ad-hoc planning (two or three individuals who wish to informally coordinate their work).

The main disadvantage of this approach is that it uses peer-to-peer network communication. When you view the rolled up schedule, the dashboard automatically retrieves up-to-date versions of each sub-schedule. If your project contains many people, this process may take time. In addition, if any team members are not running their personal dashboard at the time, the rollup will be unable to retrieve that person's sub-schedule, and will have to use a previously cached version instead. As a result, if you have many people on your project team, or if the people on your project team do not typically leave the Process Dashboard running, this approach may not be best for you; consider using the PSP/EV rollup approach instead.