ProjectLoad Blog

Project Status reports provide a way to view detailed information for projects in a simple format. Most ProjectLoad reports are designed to cross project boundaries and show the information at summary levels. The Project Status report gets down to the details of an individual project and allows you to select how much information you wish to include. You can choose any combination of the following sections in the report:

1. Summary page
2. Phase details
3. Team members
4. Alerts
5. Project notes
6. Gantt chart

The system allows you to generate multiple Project Status reports simultaneously so it is simple to generate reports for all projects you manage, or your team is working on, or that you are assigned to.

The administrator has always had the ability to specify default phases for new projects by type. When someone is adding a new project, they can choose to generate the default phases and the system will create phases automatically based on whatever the administrator specified for this type of project. Those default phases may now include dates and hours. The administrator simply specifies what percentage of the project dates should be used before the default phase starts and/or stops. For example, specifying zero percent in the default phase start date will cause the generated phase to inherit the start date of the project. Specifying 25% will cause the phase to have a default date 25% of the way between the project’s start date and target date. This same principle applies to the target date and to the estimated hours for each phase. Note that as before these are simply defaults the project manager can generate on new projects and thus can be overridden as needed on a project by project basis.

If you go to the Settings page, a new option called “Start Page” is now present. It contains a list of pages that you can have displayed immediately after logging on instead of the default daily timesheet page. This list includes the monthly and daily timesheets, the home page, the projects, activities and alert listing pages and the reports page. You can also select “Timer” to have the timer automatically startup when you logon.

For people who prefer to use the keyboard for navigating, access keys have been added to ProjectLoad. Most of the buttons are now displayed with one of the letters on the button underlined. To “click” this button using the keyboard instead of the mouse, Windows users can simply press the Alt key along with that letter and Mac users can press Control and the letter. This will allow you to save changes, perform searches and traverse the site using the keyboard for most of the navigation.

Along with the buttons, access keys may be used to switch the page you are viewing. Access key “1″ switches to the first tab, Home page, access key “2″ will take you to the second tab, the Projects listing, etc.

One of the major underlying assumptions in ProjectLoad is that those people who are responsible for performing assignments are the ones that should provide and maintain the estimates for those assignments. Each person is assigned work from project managers but it is ultimately up to the person doing the work to provide feedback to the project manager on when the assignment will be completed and how many hours of effort will be required. As long as staff provides accurate estimates, the system can provide information on projected workloads, project schedules, overtime requirements, and scheduling problems for people, teams, and projects.

Up until now the system has assumed that once the regular work hours of an individual were exhausted, overtime would be assigned evenly to all days in the timeframe an assignment was to be worked. Now you can choose to have the system place overtime only on regularly scheduled work days instead of placing hours on off days (until a limit is reached). This gives more flexibility to indicate there may be times when overtime is required and when it happens they are more likely to work longer hours on a normal work day than to come in on an off day.

To use this new feature, simply go to the Settings page and specify the number of overtime hours you would like placed on regular work days before you are willing to work on off days. If overtime is required based on your estimates and regular work schedule, overtime will be placed on regular work days first until the specified limit is reached. If even more overtime is required, then additional hours will be placed on days you would normally not work at all.

The ProjectLoad administrator can now change a system setting to permit users who have staff under them in the reporting line to edit and maintain the timesheets of their staffs. Although this is not commonly needed, there are occasions where a supervisor may need to input or adjust time for a staff member. The administrator has always had this capability and can now permit supervisors to do so as well.

To enable this capability, the administrator needs to click on the System Settings link on the Admin page. The last item allows the administrator to permit supervisors to edit staff timesheets. This option can be turned off or on as needed and takes effect immediately even if a supervisor is already logged into the system when the change is made.

The ProjectLoad administrator can allow personnel to post notes in ProjectLoad. If this capability is activated, notes can be posted on projects, phases, activities, and even on daily timesheet entries. When a note is posted, a small icon is attached so it is easier to recognize that a note exists. Notes can be used for a wide variety of purposes, but some of the more common ones we see clients using are listed below:

1. Status reports. By default, notes can be posted into a category named Status Reports. Notes that go into this level are intended to help keep the project manager and the clients better informed. They are often used to record important meetings with clients, decisions that affect the project, issues that may come up with specific phases or activities within the project, and to document changes in target dates or estimated hours. They are also commonly used for benchmarking purposes by describing milestones that have been achieved or the results of quality checks and unit tests on completed portions of the project. The report facility allows notes to be displayed by category, level, and timeframe. This makes it easy for a manager to create a report of all notes that have been posted in the Status Reports category since the last user meeting, or report only those notes that apply to a specific phase or the project. The reports can be exported into MS-Word or other word processing programs.
2. Team notes. The ProjectLoad administrator can define additional note categories beyond Status Reports. A second type that is often used is Team Notes. This area is usually used for internal communication and record keeping. The team can record results of their meetings, decisions they have reached, particularly difficult logic issues, vendor agreements, or anything else that should be documented and made available for the rest of the team. These notes are in a different category than the Status Reports and thus can be filtered out when the project manager is preparing client status reports. When these notes are coupled with the ability to attach files to a project (see Blog for more information), it makes a powerful capability to store all decisions, discussions, and supporting documentation for the project.
3. Time tracking. A third popular use of notes is to attach them to daily timesheet entries for ongoing projects. For example, if a maintenance project is kept open for a system and one team supports that system on a regular basis, some of the team members may choose to leave an activity open on their timesheet for general support of the system. When they need to charge a few hours to that activity, they can attach a note to the daily entry to explain what the hours were used for. This is especially helpful in cases where clients are billed for the hours since the manager or an administrator can produce a report showing the number of hours charged for each note attached to the activity. Using this approach provides supporting detail for invoices and makes answering questions about support issues much simpler.

There are many other ways notes can be used, but these are some of the ways that seem to be popular. Regardless of how you use notes at your organization and within your projects and activities, they can encourage additional communication and documentation. Both of those are critical in the success of any project.

The activity editor has been enhanced to allow new activities to be assigned to multiple people at once. When creating a new activity, the “Person Assigned” field is now a multiple-select field… just select all the people you want assigned. When the activity is assigned, one activity with the supplied criteria will be created for each person.

Keep in mind that the “Expected Number of Hours” will be used for each person. That is, if you enter “10″ into this field and select three people, three activities will be created, each with a ten hour estimate.

Depending on the options provided by your administrator, you may be able to attach notes to projects, phases, activities and timesheet entries. The notes can be put into different categories such as “status report” or “team notes” to help organize them. To make these notes even more useful a new icon has been added to the system that will place a small “post it” icon on any object that has a note attached to it. The notes pop-up window already allows you to decide how to filter the notes. For example, if you are looking at notes for a specific phase, you will see all notes attached to the project, the phase, all of the activities under that phase and even the timesheet entries for the activities under that phase. By changing the search conditions on the pop-up window you can filter the notes to only look at the levels you are interested in.

Based on customer feedback the phase editor has been redesigned to more closely resemble the project editor in appearance and functionality. Phases may have a different manager in charge of them than the project has. These “managed phases” are like sub projects and thus the manager of the phase needed the same capabilities as the project manager has over projects. The phase editor displays all sub phases and activities in a table (much like the project editor) and allows the phase manager to make the same kinds of changes for everything under his or her phase.