Cross-Project Program Scheduling

What this adds

StretchProjects already schedules each project on its own with a true critical path, working calendar, baselines, resource leveling, and earned-value metrics. This release adds program (multi-project) scheduling across a portfolio — the "master project / external predecessors" capability from MS Project and Primavera that most task tools cannot do at all.

• Cross-project dependencies: link a task in one project as a predecessor of a task in another. These links are now honoured by the scheduler (previously they were dropped).
• Program critical path: one critical path computed across every project in a portfolio, so you can see the true end-to-end driver, not just per-project paths.
• Cross-project hand-offs: the points where one project's deliverable gates another project — the real inter-team bottlenecks — are surfaced directly.
• External predecessors / successors: for any single project, see the tasks in other projects that constrain it or depend on it.
• What-if: simulate slipping or re-estimating a task and see the blast radius across the whole program — how the program finish date and each project move.

Availability

Rolling out (via API first). The program-scheduling engine is complete and tested and is available through the StretchProjects API behind a feature flag. The in-app program Gantt that draws the cross-project critical path across project swimlanes is the next step; until it ships, program scheduling is accessed programmatically or by your StretchSuite team.

Good to know

• A cross-project link must connect tasks in two different projects that both belong to the portfolio; a link that would create a loop across projects is rejected.
• Single-project Gantt charts are unchanged unless program scheduling is enabled.