How Do You Resolve A Conflict or Warning?

Merlin doesn’t support solving warning and conflicts automatically. There exists no algorithm that could possibly solve them automatically. As there can be several reasons and more than one approaches to deal with them.

We would like however to offer a few tips for locating the source of a conflict or warning:

• Click a warning or a conflict in the ‘Scheduling Conflicts’ area to see the object showing the warning or conflict.
• Dependencies push an activity beyond a given planned date.
• A limit has not been adhered to. (The sum of work, duration or even budget of sub-activities exceeds the respective values given on their parent activity)
• A fixed activity cannot be completed / started on the planned date. This might happen due to date constrains on the parent activity, or dependencies to predecessors/successors.

Furthermore, it should always be the responsibility of the project manager to modify the data in a project. After all, there must have been a reason, why an activity (currently showing the conflict) was planned on a specific date.

So how to solve them?

• If the values you’ve entered were mistaken, simply delete or correct them.
• If a task cannot be planned on a crucial date, which puts the project at risk to be late, maybe you can assign more resources to predecessor tasks so they can get done earlier.
• Is it possible to start all works on your project on an earlier time point?
• Is it maybe possible to work weekend or night shifts? To plan this, you can define exceptional working days.
• Is the entered value maybe not crucial, so warning can be ignored without placing the project in jeopardy? If so, just ignore this warning.