About Shortcuts

A Shortcut is a reference or a pointer to a work item.

Work item Shortcut is similar to a file shortcut in the Windows File system which simply points to a file in another location. Shortcut can be used to represent original work item in different locations of the same project work plan or even in work plans of other independent projects.

Thus a shortcut is intended to create a cross-project connection between projects managed by different teams or projects that are managed in parallel with an occasional affect on each other (see  Managing Multi Project Environment).

See Manipulating Shortcuts to learn how you can create shortcuts between different projects.

Shortcut Impact on the Project

The shortcut affects the project as if it was an integral part of the project’s hierarchy, as follows:

• Project Progress: The shortcut’s ‘%completed’ is considered in the total project completeness calculations.
• Project Schedule: The shortcut’s start date, end date and duration influence the parent. For example, in Clarizen, if the parent’s start date was not manually set, it would be set according to the start date of one of its sub-items (the one with the earliest start date).

A key use of a shortcut in your project would be creating Schedule Dependencies, which affect your project schedule

 Lifecycle: A Lifecycle operation is changing a work item’s mode, e.g. from Active to Completed.

Note:

Completeness of the shortcuts impacts completeness of the parent work item and not vice versa.

Example

Assume a milestone with 2 sub tasks (a regular task and a shortcut to a task in another project) When both the regular task and the shortcut are completed, the milestone changes from ‘Active’ to ‘Completed’. If, for some reason, the task used as a shortcut is reactivated in it’s original project, it will not automatically activate our milestone.

• Alerts: Alerts raised on the Original Work Item are reflected also in the shortcut. For example, if the original work item goes off track, the shortcut would be marked as ‘Off Track’ and notification will be sent by mail to the stakeholders in the original project and the stakeholders in project containing the shortcut.