Project schedules can change as the project is being executed due to factors such as increase in project scope, re-working deliverables, etc. In order to understand the impact of these factors on the project schedule, project leaders can use the OOTB capability of "Experiments."

With project experiments, project leaders can make changes to a snapshot of the schedule to do what-if analysis and understand the impact of changes to the project schedule without affecting the live schedule that is being worked on by the project team. Once the project leader understands the impact to the schedule, then changes made to the experiment schedule can be synced into the live schedule for consumption by the project team.

The above capability has existed OOTB for several releases. However, there is a different flavor of the above capability that also exists OOTB. It involves an approval process before the changes can be synced from the project experiment into the live schedule. This helps address those users who want project schedule changes to be approved before they are added to the live schedule.

The behavior is controlled by the project preference "Enable Approval". Below are the steps to set this up.

1. Change the project preferences attribute of “Enable Approval” to True (default value is False).
2. When the project leader opens the project experiments page, he/she also will see the issues channel in the Experiment portal view.
3. The project leader creates an Experiment, and updates the experiment schedule by adding/removing tasks and/or dependencies.
4. However, the project leader will not be able to sync the schedule changes from the Experiment to the live project schedule, because “Enable Approval” is set to True.
5. At this point, the project leader has to create an issue in the “Experiments” portal and while creating this issue, the project leader has to attach the experiment to the issue, select an approver for the experiment and issue assignee.
6. Once the issue is created, an approval route is automatically sent to the person designated as “Experiment Approver."
7. On the approval task, the approver can see the Experiment, review the details and choose to either approve or reject the task.
8. Once the experiment approval task has been approved, the project leader will be able to sync the changes from the experiment schedule to the live project schedule.

Watch the video to see the scenario:

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