Conflicts

You use Merlin Project to plan your projects? Then you already know how to insert activities, schedule them and assign resources.

Merlin Project visualizes your planning and warns you if it identifies any scheduling conflicts in your project. Scheduling warnings are shown when a specified value cannot be used. It is possible to deactivate the warnings in the View Options.

Possible warnings

Merlin Project categorizes conflicts in two groups; strong and weak. Rows with strong conflicts will show titles in red. Orange colour indicates weak conflicts.

Hover with the mouse over one of those red or orange items to see in the tool tip the related conflict.

If you have enabled the 'Traits' column, you also see related symbols for conflicts.

Weak conflicts:

• Expected work exceeds given value.
• Expected duration exceeds given value.
• Budget sum exceeds approved budget.

Strong conflicts:

• Activity starts before entered date.
• Activity starts after entered date.
• Activity ends before entered date.
• Activity ends after entered date.
• Dependency order is violated.
• More than n activities have the status "…"

Conflict resolving

There can be several reasons why a conflict arises and various ways dealing with them. An algorithm cannot possibly tell which conflicting setting should be ignored. So Merlin Project isn't supporting conflicts solving automatically.