ProjectLoad Blog

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.