ProjectLoad Blog

We have created a newsletter to keep you better informed about ProjectLoad… both what it can do today and what it will do in the future. This monthly e-mail newsletter will contain information about new developments in ProjectLoad, tips and tricks to make using the system simpler, enhancments we are working on and discussions about project management topics.

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There are several places throughout the system that allow you to look for a project by name. The most familiar is probably the “New Activity” option at the bottom of the daily timesheet, but there are others in the reporting, projects, and activities pages. When you type characters into the name box to find projects, the system performs a search that assumes you want to find any project that has a short name or a full name that matches on any part of the letters you typed. Thus if you specify “fin” you would get projects like “Financial System Support” and “Findley High School Construction” but also projects with names like “Human Resources Staffing System”. If you include an asterisk “*” in the search string, that tells the system not to assume you will accept the characters anywhere you typed. For example, if you type in “fin*”, then the system will only return projects with a short name or a full name that starts with the letters fin rather than containing fin anywhere in the name. You can do the same thing to find project names that end with certain characters like “* update” to find only projects that end with the word update.

This capability can also be useful if the project managers follow a naming convention for assigning short names to projects. If all projects that pertain to a particular group start with specific letters, they can be found more easily. For example, all projects that support the Financial Department could start with FN and when a user needs to look up a financial project they could specify “FN*” in the search field.

It’s that time again… time to put together another status report for your project. Although it may seem like unnecessary red tape, the status report is a key part of project communications. It keeps the project stakeholders on the same page as the team so that everyone knows where the project has been, where it’s at now and where the project is heading.

A key focal point for my project management practices is “no surprises". The status report should recap the key developments that have happened since the last report so that even those who were not involved in those developments are made aware of them. And as the project manager, it is your responsibility to document both the good and the bad (or the “could be bad") so that everyone knows what’s going on during the project as things happen… not weeks or months later.

Although costs and timelines can be key metrics in a status reports, the less tangible items must also be included. Could upcoming vacations impact the project schedule? Will vendor negotiations affect the project budget? Are there still some ill-defined requirements that need to be examined? These questions and more need to be recognized and addressed within the status report in an open and honest way so that there will be “no surprises".

The system now allows you to post notes to projects, phases, activities and timesheet entries, if your administrator has activated that feature. Notes appear in a separate pop-up window and may be added or edited by anyone authorized to create or edit the entity they are attached to. For example, project level notes may be added by the project manager or others authorized to update the project. Timesheet notes may be created or edited by the person authorized to update the timesheet.

A new report has also been added that displays the notes. Like the other reports, this one has extensive filtering to control which notes are displayed including choosing what level of notes to show (project, phase, activity, or timesheet), what date range to include, and only showing notes written or edited by a person, members of a team, or attached to certain types of projects. These reports can be exported to an RTF file that can be opened in Word, WordPad, OpenOffice and TextEdit (Mac).

To activate notes for your organization, the system administrator must click on the “Admin” tab, then select “System Settings”. Set the “Use Notes” option to Yes and click “Done”.