Project Management

Managing single Projects:

• List of Projects­
• Find a Project­­
• Cre­ating a new Project
• Adding additional Project Attributes
• Assigning Members to Projects
• Structuring Projects
• Delete a Project
• ­Remove a Project

Managing Project Tasks

• Creating Tasks
• Viewing Tasks
  

Project Planning & Scheduling

• Project Planning & Scheduling
  

Project Collaboration

• Project Forum
• Document Management
• Mail Integration

Project Risk Management

• Project Risk Management

Project Controlling

• Managing Progress
• Earned Value Analysis

Financial Management of Projects 

• Financial Su­mmary of a Project
• Managing Project Expenses
• Creating financial Documents such as Invoices, Provider Bills, etc.

• ­Project Programs
• ­Managing Resources across Projects
• Capacity Management

• Project Approval Workflow

Other Documents and Resources, partly outdated

• Customized Project Manager Guide 
• Gantt Timesheet User Guide
• Consulting Guide 

Managing single Projects

Projects are thought to be "containers" of sub-projects and tasks. You want to set up a new project if you have a new group of people ­collaborating.
Projects are carrying permission information for the tasks below the project. 

List of Projects

A complete list of projects is available from http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/projects. Permission settings might prevent users from viewing or editing projects.

Find a Project

The quickest and most convenient way finding a project is probably using the ]po[ Full Text Search. A search box is located on the top right corner of each ]po[ screen. Alternatively you can go to http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/projects and browse or filter by project name. 

Creating a new Project

To create a new project please use the Admin link "Add New Project" that can be found on http://[YOUR_SERVER]/intranet/projects. Depending on your configuration you might need to set some project attribute values first by going through a 'wizard' before seeing the main creation page.  

A new project can also be created by cloning an existing one. If no clone link is available from a Project Admin Menu, please ask your System Administrator to allow cloning by setting parameter EnableCloneProjectLinkP accordingly.   

Adding additional Project Attributes

Assigning Members to Projects

New members can be assigned by using the "Add member" link in portlet "Project Members".
If users get assigned to subprojects or task, the system adds them automatically to their parent elements. This helps Project Managers of the Parent Projects to get an overview of all employees involved in all subprojects. Please do not reverse this automatic assignment. If you want to limit visibility or time sheet tracking on parent elements, please consider adjusting parameters PermissiveHourLogging and TimesheetTaskVisibilityScope.   

Structuring Projects

Projects can be structured by adding Sub-Projects to existing Projects. A link can be found in the sidebar on a Projects Main Page. If this link is not visible, the user might not have the permission to create Sub-Projects or the creation is not allowed in general.    

When to create a subproject?

• If you want to delegate responsability to a different project manager
  
• If you want to separate access to two different subprojects.

Example:
You don't want to let developers (execution subproject) access the contents of the "acquisition subproject" with contract and sales information. ­

Delete a Project

Remove a Project

Managing Project Tasks

Creating Tasks

Tasks are created within Main Projects or Sub-Projects. 

Task Attributes

Time attributes

Tasks are associated with three different measures of time:

• Extimated hours:
  The PMs estimate how long it will take to complete the task
• Billable hours:
  How many hours can be billed to a customer.
• Logged hours:
  The actually spent number of hours logged via the Timesheet module.

Cost Center

Materials

Gantt Scheduling

Viewing Tasks ­

Task Home

Comprehensive information about a task are made available on the tasks home screen:

Information about tasks are made available in several locations: 

• Project Home:
  This list contains usually the top 25 Sub-Projects and Tasks of a given Project
  
• Home Task List:
  Component contains tasks assigned to the current user
  
• Project Main Task List:
  Available from the sub menu of the Project Space
  
  
• Task Report:
  Provided an overview of tasks across al projects
  

­Project Planning & Scheduling

Project Planning using native ]po[ features

a) Define your project by creating project and sub.projects.

b) Assign resources to your main project

c) Create tasks within you project/sub-project and set task attributes such as 'name', 'start/end date', 'Planned Units', 'Billable Units', etc.
­

Project Planning and scheduling using 3rd party tools MS Project/OpenProj/GanttProject

Projects planned using Microsoft Project Open (MS Project) or other tools can be imported into ]po[. ]po[ also allows you export projects to MS Project, OpenProj and GanttProject. 
Advantages of this round trip a­re:

• Project planning using 3rd Party Desktop solutions is usually more user friendly because of teh tools drag/&drop features and other amenities a desktop application can provide best
  
• Project Managers can keep their their tool of choice for Project Management but the organization can benefit at the same time from a central project repository without the need to purchase additional licenses from Microsoft.

Best practice for round trips from and to 3rd party PM Tools:

b) Assign resources to your project ("Add member")

c)  Use the "Download GanttProject/OpenProj" link and export the project

d) Use OpenProj/GanttProject and create additional tasks, dependencies and resource assignments comfortably with the "Drag-and-Drop" features provided by the 3rd party applications

e) Import the structure back to ]project-open[ using the link "Upload Gantt OpenProj File"
­

Find here more information ­which versions of MS Project/OpenProj/GanttProject are currently supported by ]po[

­Project Collabo­ration

Project Forum

For additional information please see Forum User Guide

­Document Management

For additional information please see Filestorage User Guide

Mail Integration

Mail Integrations allows the assignment of emails to Project. For additional information see Mail Integration

Project Risk Management

Managing Project Risks

Project Risks are managed using Portlet "Project Risks". 

Creating a new risk

References:

• Portlet: Project Risks
• Process Risk Management 
  

­Project Controlling

­Managing Progress

Project Progress can be entered manually or evaluated automatically based on the "% completed" values of each task.

• Setting Project Progress manually
  PM enter progress manually. Recommended for smaller projects to keep administrative overhead to a minimum
  
  
• Automatic calculation
  Automatic calculation of "% completed" on a "Project" level requires Parameter "AutomaticProjectAdvanceP" set to true. The value will be calculated when tasks attributes "% completed" and "Planned Hours" are set. Please note that manually adjustments to the "% completed" attribute on a Project level value are overwritten when one of the "%-completed" attributes of a child-tasks changes.   
  

Earned Value Analysis

For additional information please see EVA Portlet Page

­Financial Management of Projects

Financial Su­mmary of a Project

...

Managing Project Expenses

Creating financial Documents such as Invoices, Provider Bills, etc.

­Creating Invoice from scratch

Let's assume you are a freelancer and you have just performed 3 days of training for a customer. You now want to write an invoice quickly and your ]project-open[ has been configured to allow such ad-hoc invoicing. You company is called "Tigerpond Inc.", and your customer is called "ABC Consulting".

• Go to our http://demo.project-open.net/  demo server
• Log on as "Ben Bigboss"
  
• Go to "Finance" tab
• Click on "Create Customer Invoice from Scratch"
• Enter some invoice lines and select "ABC Consulting" as customer and press "New Customer Invoice"
• Click on the "Preview as HTML" link of the finished invoice to preview the invoice.
  
• Click on the "Send Customer Invoice as HTML attachment" link to send the invoice to the customer.
  

The entire process takes less then a minute if the customer's information already exists.

Please see the Detailed Tutorial for screenshots.

(Creating a simple ad-hoc invoice with ]project-open[.)

Create an Invoice using the Invoice Wizard

Let's assume that you have agreed to update your customer's web site. During this project, one of your senior Web developers will work on-site at the customer's offices. Neither you nor the customer know how much time will be necessary to work on the Web site, so you have agreed to invoice your Web developer with EUR 80/hour, up to a limit of 100 hours.

In order to capture the time spent, you will need to set up a project where your Web developer will need log his hours:

• Go to our http://demo.project-open.net/  demo server
• Log on as "Ben Bigboss.
• Go to the "Projects" tab and choose "Add a New Project" in the page's navigation bar.
• The screenshot below shows a sample project definition. Please see the Project page for a detailed description of the project fields.
• Once the project has been created, please go to the "Project Member" plugin and click on the "Add members" link.
• In the next page please select "David Developer" and "add as Full Member" with the "Notify" field enabled to add David as a project member and to allow him to log hours on the project. David will receive an Email saying that he is now a member of the project.
  
• During the next days and weeks, David can log hour on the project by going to the "Timesheet" tab, selecting the day and entering his hours.
• Once the work is done, you go to the project, select the "Finance" tab (of the project!) and click on link "New Customer Invoice from Timesheet Tasks"  
• You will then enter a Wizard that helps you to create an invoice based on five different criterias:
  
• Planned Units
• Billable Units
• All reported Units
• Reported Units in Interval
• All unbilled Units

This screencast shows how to create a project and tasks in ]project-open[. Based on the logged hours an invoice will be created by using a wizard that guides the user through­ the process.

Project Portfolio Management ­/ Resource Management

Creating "Project Programs"

From V4.0 on ]po[ provides support for  "Project Programms". "Project Programs" are a set of several related projects that are related to each other.
While the concept of "Parent-" and "Subprojects" always requires having the same client, "Project Programs" can be bundled based on arbitrary criteria. 
 
In order to create a "Programm", a new Project of type "Program" needs to be created. In some distributions this particular Project Type would need to be enabled first.
Also the DynField "Program" of Object Type "Project" needs to be visible and editable for all users that should be capable to create Programs and assign Projects to them. 

Managing Resources across Projects­

Please see Resource Planning

Capacity Management

­This feature is part of ]po['s Absence Management and allows you assigning resources to projects for the upcoming months under consideration of current absences. ­
­

See this video to learn more about ]po['s Capacity Planing capabilities:

⁞

Filter:

List of employees: By default all inhouse employees are selected. The list can can be minimized by de-selecting users     
Month/Year: Planning is done on a month-base, please select the month you do the capacity planning for  

Horizontal axis:

The horizontal axis shows for all internal employees the following information:

Vertical axis: ­

The vertical axis shows all projects (independed from their project status) having either start-date or end-date in the period selected.
The days available are calculated as: Number of days planned - Number of days logged for each project and their respective sub-projects.

Workflows

Project Approval Workflow

]project-open[ comes with a pre-configured Project Approval Workflow. ­
In order to activate this workflow you have to add the string "project_approval_wf" to each "Intranet Project Type" category (String1) this workflow should be trigge­red for.
(Please note that is not sufficient to set this value for a parent category)