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 administrator controls what level of authorization is required for a user to create or edit projects, phases, and activities. Those security restrictions apply across the organization for all projects. The project and phase managers can introduce a finer level of control for each of their projects and phases on a case by case basis. This finer level cannot override the minimum task control set by the administrator, but it can further restrict who is authorized to perform certain tasks, including preventing non-authorized personnel from even seeing some projects, phases, or activities.

In the project and phase editors is a field labeled security. There are four possible values:

• Normal (low) – This level adds no additional security to the project or phase. It means the settings provided by the administrator under the minimum task control are the only restrictions on the project and its components. This setting allows personnel to assign themselves to the project as needed. This is the default for projects and phases.
• Restricted (medium) – Activities under a restricted project or phase may only be created or edited by people who are in the project manager’s reporting line. This includes up and down the reporting line and both direct and indirect relationships. This setting allows personnel in the project manager’s reporting line to assign themselves to the project or phase as needed.
• Protected (high) – This level reduces the ability to create or edit any project component (including the project itself) to the project manager and all people above him or her in the reporting line. This setting does not permit people to assign themselves to a project. If someone needs to work on a protected project, they will have to be assigned to it by the project or phase manager.
• Confidential – This level is intended for highly confidential projects such as long-term disability and sick leave. The security rules are as follows:
  1. Creating new project components has no more security than the Normal level. This means that anyone with sufficient authority based on the minimum task levels set by the administrator can create confidential projects, phases, and activities under a confidential project. Thus people can assign themselves to a confidential project as needed.
  2. Editing a confidential project or any of its phases is restricted to the project manager and everyone above him or her in the reporting line. Editing activities under a confidential project is restricted to the person assigned to the activity and the project manager and above
  3. Viewing confidential projects and phases is available to everyone. Viewing activities under a confidential project is restricted to the person assigned to the activity and the project manager and everyone above the project manager in the reporting line. This means that although everyone can see the confidential project, they can’t see who has been assigned to it, how many hours they are charging, or their estimated target dates

Most projects do not require additional security and thus fit well in the “normal” security category. However, if you have projects under tight restrictions or special circumstances, you can get finer control over the project or phase using the security level. The security level only applies to the project or phase where it is set.

Most companies have holidays throughout the year such as New Year’s, Memorial Day, and Labor Day that occur on specific dates. These can be accounted for in many different ways within ProjectLoad, but a couple of methods appear to have some distinct advantages.

One way to make life easier for the staff and the administrator is to treat each Holiday as a separate project. In this approach, the administrator sets up a project for 2006 New Year’s Day with an appropriate start and end date such as 01/02/06 and 01/02/06 and no estimated hours. Then they add a phase with the name “Holiday” and let the dates default from the project. Once the phase is in place the administrator must manually add one activity for each person in the company. Fortunately, the system will automatically put in the dates and name of the activity, but the administrator would need to add eight hours in the estimated hours field. Although this part is laborious, it makes everything easier from here on.

Once the New Year’s Day project is in place, the administrator can use the Copy function (from the project editor or the projects page) and copy the project to create another holiday such as 2006 Memorial Day. During the copy process the administrator simply renames the project, specifies all phases and activities should be copied (including their estimates), and tells the system to move the estimated dates forward to the correct dates (05/29/06). This process will create the next holiday project and assign everyone automatically.

Using this method means the administrator only has to set everyone up one time. It also means everyone will have an activity with the right dates and reserved hours so the system will automatically include the data in their workload forecast and place it on their timesheets on the appropriate day. All the staff need do is fill in the eight hours in their timesheet and close the activity when they have entered the time for that holiday.

New employees will have to add themselves to the remaining holidays for the year (unless the administrator does it for them). As employees leave the company, their future activities will automatically close when they are deactivated. This also means that next year the administrator can create the holiday projects by copying the last one from the current year. Thus the administrator should only have to suffer the laborious process of mass assigning everyone to a holiday one time.

Generally, there are no end-of-year tasks associated with ProjectLoad. It is designed to be continuously updated so routine tasks such as adding or removing personnel, running reports, and closing pay periods occur on an on-going basis. However, some companies have found it helpful to break up on-going tasks into fiscal year projects.

For example, if your company has a generic administration project for people to charge time against as they do administrative tasks throughout the year, that project can be left open indefinitely or closed each year and a new one opened. There are pros and cons to each approach. The advantages to closing a routine project each year and opening a new one are:

• If employees are creating distinct activities for specific tasks under the project, closing the project at the end of the year creates a fresh project for people to attach activities to. This can help make the project easier to manage since it doesn’t accumulate a large number of closed activities over many years.
• Having a separate project for each year may make it easier to generate certain totals only reports, but given that the reporting system allows users to span any time frame and cross year boundaries, this advantage is fairly slim.

The disadvantages of closing a routine project each year are:

• Those employees who have been keeping an on-going activity open will have to create a new activity since closing a project will close all of its underlying activities
• Certain reports may be more difficult to obtain since the hours associated with the on-going project will be split across more than one project if a report spans more than one year.
• If there are a large number of support projects to be closed and rebuilt, this can be a laborious task.

In general, it is best to treat projects as independent of year end boundaries. For a standard project (one with an actual start and end date), most people do not choose to artificially break the project apart based on when the fiscal year happens to end. The reports in ProjectLoad allow the user to generate figures as to how many hours were spent in each fiscal year without having to break the project apart. The same logic applies to on-going projects. Instead of closing a project each year and opening a new one that is intended to track the same type of work (such as routine maintenance of a system), it is usually best to just leave it open and report the hours across the year boundaries or within year boundaries as desired.

To help with the issues identified above, here are some tips for the project manager:

• If you choose to close on-going projects and open new ones each year, then before closing last year’s project, copy it to next year’s project. The copy function (available from the project editor or projects page) includes options to copy phases and/or activities, adjust dates and estimated hours, and rename the project during the copy process. Using this function when closing an on-going project at the end of the year will automatically create a new activity for each employee who had an open activity in the old project.
• Use a naming convention that will help people to group the projects across year boundaries. For example, if there is an on-going maintenance project to support the XYZ Computer Program and it has a short name of XYZ-SUP, you might want to name the next year’s version XYZ-SUP-06. This will let people who wish to run a report on the support for that system specify “XYZ-SUP*” in the short name search field so they can locate all projects for that system. Note that for reporting purposes this is still not as effective as simply keeping the support project open, but it helps makes the hours easier to locate.
• The major drawback to leaving an on-going project open is the accumulation of closed activities over the years. A new capability in the project detail report automatically collapses phases so the actuals and estimates can be seen without having to drill into the lists of activities underneath. This same change will be added to the project editor in the coming months.

In general, ProjectLoad is intended to track the workload of the entire staff and organize it into projects and activities. Since the workload doesn’t stop and start based on the fiscal year, ProjectLoad has very little connection with the fiscal year concept. Thus there is generally very little that needs to be done at the end of each year.

On-going projects (with no target dates) lend themselves to “buckets” of time rather than actual discreet activities. People tend to look at an on-going project as something they will charge time to forever, so they sometimes open an activity and just leave it open as a convenience so they can put time in it when they need to. There are times when this is appropriate, but in many cases it may not be the best option.

For example, you may choose to open a “vacation” activity with no dates and simply record time when you use it. This approach will make your timesheet longer and make it impossible for the system to forecast vacations (thus reserving time). It might be better to open an activity for vacations (like a one week ski trip on a particular week in February) and give it start and stop dates and estimated hours. That way the system will know to reserve that time and schedule other work around it. This would also warn managers if they try to schedule work during that period.

Another example is time off for illness. You could open an activity on your timesheet for illness and leave it open all the time so you could add hours as needed. However, since most people are not sick very often, it would keep the timesheet shorter to simply close the activity after you have used it and then reopen it if you need it again.

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when deciding if an open ended activity should be a “bucket”:

1. Is this an activity you will charge time to often? If so it may save time to just leave it open. If you do not charge time to it often, it will keep the timesheet shorter to simply reopen the old activity (or create a new one) as needed.
2. Does this work come in discreet pieces? Although the work may be under an on-going maintenance or production support project, a particular activity may be something that has a target date and number of hours such as installing an upgrade or making a change because of a change in an interface file. Remember, although the project may be open-ended, an individual task can have estimated dates and hours thus allowing the system to forecast that time.
3. Would it help your manager to see the different activities being performed or is one lump sum of hours sufficient to explain what you are working on? All of your hours will be rolled up to the phase and project levels for summary reporting, but is it likely that someone will want to drill into more detail to see what activities are involved?

Avoiding buckets (on-going activities that you leave on your timesheet every day) can keep your timesheet shorter, provide a better breakdown of where your time is going, and help the system forecast more accurately. However, buckets are useful when you are dealing with an on-going task that you perform often and doesn’t need to be broken down into more detail than can be provided simply by entering timesheet notes. It will be up to you (and possibly your manager) to decide what level of detail is needed for on-going tasks. If a “bucket” of time is sufficient, then you need to decide whether to leave it on your timesheet all the time, or simply reopen it as needed.

Almost everyone has some activities that do not have target dates. The daily administrative duties that everyone needs to do, a routine job that has to be performed every day, day in and day out, or some task that needs to get done each week regardless of other duties that may come along. ProjectLoad provides several methods to forecast the work of each individual. For activities that have a known target date and number of hours, this forecasting is pretty straightforward (although there are a few options available in how to spread the hours). However, it is important to include those activities that may not have a known date or hours, but will nevertheless take up some portion of a person’s time.

ProjectLoad provides this function by allowing you to “reserve” some amount of time each day, week, or month. You can activate this option by editing the activity and selecting the “Reserve ____ hours per _____ for this activity". You simply fill in how many hours you wish to reserve and whether or not they are to be reserved for each work day, work week, or work month.

There is an important difference between choosing to reserve by work day versus work week or work month. The work day option assumes you will be spending the time on the task during that day and if you don’t, it quietly disappears. The work week and work month options assume you are working with a repetitive task that will require the specified amount of time somewhere during that week (or month). For example:

• If you have a task that you are trying to set aside some generic time for (such as general administration meetings), you should use the daily reserve option. This works well because it assumes you’ll be spending the time on it during that day and if you don’t, it drops off. Thus if you set aside two hours per day, and you have gone through the first three days of the week without charging any time the system will assume only four more hours for the week (two per day).
• If you have a task that requires some average number of hours each week (maybe you spend ten hours each week reviewing reports or performing some operations tasks), then you should reserve ten hours per work week. This option assumes that you will need to spend the full ten hours at some point during the week. If you have gone through the first three days of the week without charging any time the system will place five hours on each of the last two days so you can get in your full ten hours. If you spend the ten hour in the first two days, the rest of the week is assumed to be clear.

Forecasting your work allows your manager to see how much time you have available in the future, and helps him or her plan project schedules much more accurately. It also prevents overloading of personnel when two different managers try to assign work to the same person. In order for forecasting to be accurate, it is important to make certain ProjectLoad has as complete a picture as possible of where your time will be needed.

After diligently filling out your timesheet each day, you may wish to review the information before closing the period. There are several ways to get an “overview” look at your timesheets for a month or pay period, and all of these methods will allow you to jump directly to particular days if you need to make adjustments.

The most common method of reviewing your daily timesheets is from the Monthly tab on the ProjectLoad Menu bar. The Monthly page lists each day of the month in calendar format, and displays the total hours worked on each day. The total is broken into how much time when into each project on each day to give you a feel for where your time went. The system will also include forecasted hours on each day into the future to show how many hours you are projected to spend on each day. You can jump directly to any day in the month simply by clicking on the date in each box.

A second method for getting a quick snapshot of how much time you have entered for the month is to go to the Settings page and set your Home Page Options to display the Monthly Timesheet. You will need to decide if you want it shown on the right or left side of the page (right is usually best since it fits nicely under the Active People box). Once you set this option, your Home Page will include a small calendar of the month that shows the total number of hours you have entered for each day. You can jump directly to any day in the month simply by clicking on the date in each box.

A third method is available from the Reports menu. If you run a Timesheet Report you will get a detailed display of how you spent each day in the pay period. The report is organized as a table that lists the dates across the top and the individual activities (organized by project) down the left side. From this report, you can see exactly how you entered your time for each day of the period. You can also jump directly to any day by clicking in the column heading for that day. The Timesheet Report is opened in a pop-up window, but if you click on a column heading in the report, the underlying ProjectLoad browser will automatically move to the timesheet for the day you picked. You can make changes for that day, save them, and then click the Refresh button in the Timesheet Report to see the effect of your changes.

When project managers need to modify a project, they normally choose to use the project editor. The editor allows them to edit any component of the project, add new phases and activities, and align the dates using the “push down” and “pull up” options on each phase and the project. However, sometimes a person just wants to take a look at the project components and edit a few of them as needed. In that case, the project detail report can be a better choice than the full editor.

The project detail report can be accessed from the Home page or the Projects page by choosing the “report” option for a project. This report displays the project, all phases, and all activities under each phase. The information is organized based on target dates and highlighted based on the status of each component and any alerts. Hover help provides a quick way to see the worst alert for each component. Each component can be edited simply by clicking on the component title. As you finish editing an underlying component, the system returns to the project detail report.

The detail report thus serves as an overview of the entire project, and a quick loading menu letting you jump directly to any component you need to change. It is available even if you don’t have the authority to edit the entire project and can give you a convenient way to see the pieces you do have authority to access as they relate to the project and make it easier for you to edit them.

ProjectLoad supports a variety of reports, each with a wide range of search options. The system will automatically remember the most recent search options you used, but it also provides a way for you to record the options to be reused whenever you wish. After you select a report and get the search conditions set, you can choose to save the search options by clicking on the “Save As” button on the report. The system will ask you to provide a name for the report and record the settings you established in the database under the name you provide. The next time you go to the report menu, the custom version of the report will be listed in the menu with the standard reports. The system will organize the custom reports in lists under each report type. These custom reports form a private library of reports that you can reproduce as needed.

For example, if you need to regularly produce a report showing the exact hours spent on each project of a particular type in the prior month (perhaps for billing purposes), you can set the search conditions, run the report, and use the Save As button to record the settings under a name such as “Prior Month Billing”. The report menu will then contain an extra line under the “Work Hours By Project” labeled “Prior Month Billing”. You can create this report simply by using the Report button on the menu. Note that if you set the search dates to be customized and manually supply a date range, then rerunning the report will produce that same date range each time. If you set the search dates to something more generic such as “Last Month”, the report will change report periods automatically based on the date you run it. You can edit the saved search conditions if you wish to tweak your search options and save the report again under the same or another name. Saved reports may be deleted by running the report and using the “Delete” button.

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.

Since forecasting occurs at the individual level, each person must take responsibility for keeping their own forecasts as accurate as possible. When each person keeps their forecasting data accurate, the information at all other levels (teams, organizations, projects, phases, etc) will also be accurate as it will be based on the perspective of the individuals who are actually assigned to do the work. The system supports keeping independent versions of the estimates at the phase and project level, so the changes entered by individuals at the activity level will provide valuable feedback without overriding the project schedule created by the project manager.

Forecasting Steps
1. Verify your normal work schedule has been set correctly by the administrator. If you click on the “Settings” tab, you will see the normal works hours for an average week. For example, it may show that you work eight hours Monday through Friday and no hours on Sunday or Saturday. This schedule will be used for forecasting when you work so it is important it be correct. If it is wrong, you will need to ask the administrator to correct it.

2. Verify your activities. For forecasting to be accurate, you need to be certain that everything that is expected to take any significant amount of time is included. Obviously work on projects should be included. You should also make certain you have an activity open for anything you do on a regular basis such as administration or perhaps maintenance or recurring routine duties. If you know you will need a week to go skiing in February, it would be a good idea to open an activity for that with a start and end date and the correct number of hours so the system can take that time into account during forecasting.

3. All activities need to be set to the correct forecasting option. When an activity is assigned to you by your manager, the forecasting option is usually set by the manager. If you add an activity yourself, be sure you set the forecasting option that makes the most sense. Currently there are four options to select from:

• Forecast activity to be evenly distributed over available work hours. This option is usually the most suitable choice when an activity has a target date and an estimated number of hours. This option instructs the system to assume you will work on the activity as time is available, but that the work will most likely be spread across the period from the start date to the target date
• Forecast activity to be completed as quickly as possible. Like the previous option, this only applies when an activity has a target date and an estimated number of hours. The system will take any available time and use all of it up each day until the estimated hours have been accounted for
• Reserve hours per period for this activity. This option lets you set aside “x” hours per day, week, or month for the activity. The system will schedule the work to be performed based on the reserve specified. The system will override the reserve if more time is needed to meet the target date. This option is a good choice for activities that do not have a known target date or a known number of hours. For example, if you usually spend at least an hour a day on general administration, it would make sense to have an administrative activity that is always open so you could charge time to it each day. To make forecasting of your workload more accurate, you could tell the system to hold one hour a day aside for this activity when it is forecasting your workload
• Do not forecast this activity. This option is useful if you have an activity that you keep open but seldom charge time to. For example, if you like to keep a sick time activity open so you can charge time when you need to, then you can set this option since it doesn’t make sense to try to predict when you will be ill. On a side note, you should consider whether or not keeping an activity open on your timesheet all the time is a good idea if you rarely charge time to it. Instead, you could open a new activity when you need it, charge the time, then close the activity thus keeping your timesheet smaller

4. Verify the estimated hours and target dates of all activities. It is important to keep your estimates as accurate as you can so the estimates are available directly on every version of the daily timesheet. When you fill in the daily timesheet, check that the hours remaining on each task and the estimated target date are still accurate. If they are not, you can correct them immediately without leaving the timesheet. One of the timesheets (Work List) even sorts the activities by target date so the ones coming due soonest are at the top of the page. Remember that you may raise an alert condition if you change an activity and it uses up more hours than the project can spare or if it is completed after the phase or project is targeted for completion. However if the estimate you are giving is accurate the sooner you raise the issue the better.

5. Check your schedule. Once you have made sure your scheduled work hours are correct and that each activity has the right forecast option and accurate estimates, you should take a look to see how your schedule has been forecasted.

• You can get a very quick view of this from the “Monthly” tab. This view shows the month with the number of hours worked on each day and the forecasted number of hours for future days in parenthesis. You can move forward as many months as you wish to see the total number of hours you have in your schedule. If any of the days have a total that is greater than your normally scheduled work hours, the display will show that day in yellow. If the total hours on a day are greater than a maximum figure permitted by the administrator, that day will turn red
• There are several reports that will show your forecasted workload in more detail. The “Personnel Availability Report” report can be set to a future time period (such as this month plus the next few) for just you and run showing daily, weekly, or monthly columns. It will display how much time is available (the difference between the hours you would normally work minus the hours you are forecasted to work). If you click on the “detail” link, it will display the projects you are assigned to during that same period and how many hours you are forecasted to work on each project for each day/week/month in the period. You can keep zooming in by following the detail links to get down to the activities. Alternatively, you could use the “Work Hours by Activity” report to list all of your activities and include the forecasted hours to see how many hours you are scheduled to work each day/week/month on each activity.

The project manager will be basing project and work schedules on the forecasts. If the forecasts are inaccurate because of out of date estimates or activities that are not being forecasted when they should be, the manager will be setting the work schedule of their personnel based on bad data.