Now that you have entered some basic information about your
project, you can now see what sort of project plan JXCirrus
Project comes up with.
JXCirrus Project doesn't see planning as something that you just
at one time. It is constantly reworking the plans in the
background. Any time you change a task, it tries to fix up
the plans to handle the new change. This means that it spends a
lot of time thinking. On the plus side, it will alert you to
any problems much earlier.
Look at the bottom right corner of the main window. You should see the date and time. Just to the left of that is a symbol:
If it is a symbol, then the system is thinking.
If it is a symbol, then the system has finished
thinking and has made up a plan.
One thing... You don't have to wait for the system to stop thinking before you do things. You can keep on adding tasks, updating tasks etc. The only reason to wait for it to stop thinking is that it won't have a complete plan until then.
Lets see what it has planned for your project tasks. Using the
tree view, click on the "Project Plan" task. In the item view on
the right, you should see details of the task. At the bottom of
the details should be a little table saying "Predicted Times".
This tells you when the system has planned for you to do the
project planning.
Now, you don't actually have to do the task then... What the system is doing is finding a way to fit the tasks in so they get done before the due date. You can do your jobs in any order you like - The system doesn't care as long as they get done before the due date. If it doesn't think you will get things done by the due date, then it will warn you and highlight those tasks it thinks you should do first.
This is a bit complex, but here is the super high level view. There is a much more detailed bit of the manual about automatic planning if you want to know more.
There are a couple of warnings the system might give you about your task.
NOTE: This may seem obvious, but JXCirrus Diary has to be running for it to warn you.