Gadzirai Moyo

Introduction

The Project Management solution project for the Ministry of Defence is aimed at augmenting and improving the existing processes by technologically automating them. Description This document consists of the following sections: Section (Introduction) provides the overall introduction to the document. It also describes the 1 structure thereof. Section (Project Management) provides a brief description of project management as a discipline. It 2 also describes the need to have a project management solution and how it would be of benefit to the client. Section (Project Management Software - Proposed Solution) describes and depicts 3 diagrammatically the proposed solution. Section (Technology) documents at a high level the technology we shall employ to develop this 4 solution. It also describes how we shall leverage the initial technological investment made by the client. Section (Conclusion) provides a brief conclusion to the document. 5 Purpose The purpose of this document is to present the high-level recommendations for the overall solution. Specific objectives of this deliverable include the ability to: Formulate an initial vision of the overall system. Depict the proposed solution. Ensure that the proposed solution fits into the technological investments by the client.

Project Management

To define Project Management as a discipline, we need to first define what a project is. Project There are several definitions of what a project is, all over the shore. I have chosen the following which is very accurate and concise. A project is an assignment/task/job that has to be undertaken and completed within a set time, budget, resources and performance specifications designed to meet the needs of stakeholder and beneficiaries. This definition also mentions some of the characteristics of a project which are: Projects may be different from ordinary work. They are intended to change things Projects have a timeframe with a beginning and an end Projects have to be planned Projects use resources and need a budget Projects require evaluation the criteria for evaluation need to be established from the beginning Projects have an outcome, which is not necessarily known at the outset The outcome is very often a product of some kind At the end of a project, decisions need to be taken about whether to use or institutionalise the outcome Projects involve people(which are resources) Project Management Project Management is the use of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to plan and implement activities to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a project.

Project Management Software

The Project Management Software solution will align and fulfil the requirements of project management. The solution will also be compatible to the current investment on IBM WebSphere Portal; hence we propose to develop the Project Management Software as portlets that will be deployed on top IBM WebSphere Portal. One can look at portlets as modules/applications that make up the Project Management Software Solution. These portlets can be developed separately from each other and can also exist separately from each other, but will need each other in order to make up a fully functional Project Management Software solution Since the Project Management portlets will be built on top of WebSphere Portal, we will make use of some of the features of Portal such as the following: Single Sign On This will enable the user to login once into Portal and among other activities be able to interact with all the various portlets (applications) in order the desired objective. Role-based Access In a project we have resources / stakeholders that perform different functions/roles. Since we are using Portal, we will be able to have different roles accessing different views of the same Project Management Software. These views will be accessed after the user signs on into Portal

General Views

This section shall provide details of the proposed solution.

Landing Page
ff

Landing Page..continued
Description Landing page This is a special home page designed to answer first user questions and give quick access to first operations. This is what the first user will see. This page is almost only a collection of links and is not intended to be an operative one. We intentionally put a lot of links here, to express the breadth of our solution. All main features are covered, or better hinted, starting from projects, tasks, resources, work logging, issues, todos, agenda.

Commonly used page

Commonly used page ...continued

In order to have an idea about how the Project

Management Software solution will help organizing projects activities, lets see an operative page. The Get things done page is designed for people that will use the solution as support for their activities You see at first glance your agenda, your tasks, what you are working on (my assignments), your work log (timesheet day), your to-dos, your issues, your most used entities, company news.

Project manager PM page

Project manager PM page..cont

This page has been designed to fit project managers

(PM) needs. The sample pages are similar, what usually differs is the amount of items in each box, which depends on how your teams are structured and on how many open projects you have.

Project and Tasks

Introduction The solution will let you break down every project/task in an arbitrary (but reasonably sized) sub-tree of sub-tasks/projects. We could use the convention of defining project to be a top-level task (the root) and simply task the others and vice-versa. A project/task is simply defined by its name. Of course if you want the task to be useful you have to specify a starting date, duration, and at least a resource that will work/manage/supervise it. So name, timing and assignments are the main properties of a project/task. Editing In order to create a task you must have permission to do so. By clicking on the projects on the menu bar you will see by default your open tasks (if any).The easiest way to create a task is to press create project button.

Project Creation

Shows if they are exiting projects

Creating new projects

Project Creation ... continued

Task/Project general data summarizes its main properties. In detail: Code/short name: this is usually the mnemonic name of the project/task. If your projects are related to external systems (such as an accounting systems) you can use that code. Code is not strictly required to be unique, but having a unique code may be useful for example for referring it by e-mail When you are creating sub-tasks the code is proposed automatically by default as code.1,code.2 and so on, but if you change the proposed code with code.a or code.I the solution will try to guess the following codes with code.b code.c or code.II and code.III. Name: it is the common/descriptive name of the task. It is mandatory and it is not required unique. Each mandatory field is prefixed by *. You cannot save a form without filling each mandatory field, in case you try to do it the field will be enhanced as follows: and the action is stopped. Type: is a rough classification of the task, production and template are commonly used types. You can add how many types you need by pressing the button (if you have the permission). Task types can also be a base for generating task codes: Tags: tags is here used to classify your tasks and group them. Tags can be used to filter tasks when searching. Status: status shows the status of a project/task

Project Creation ... continued

Start/duration/end: as stated before, task timing is one of most

relevant information about tasks. Start, end and duration are always consistent; this means that if you specify start and duration the end is computed, or if you specify start and end, duration is computed. If you are changing dates for an existing task, a popup will propose to insert a reason for the change. Milestone: a milestone always matches the start or the end of a task. This because usually a milestone is related to a delivery or a phase kickoff. Of course setting a milestone changes the behaviour of the start/duration/end triplet; for instance if you set start and end as milestones, duration is disabled. Progress: is the percentage of completeness. Relevance: is how important you feel this project is for you/your company. No computation, no constraints. Description/deliverables: use them for describing projects and delivery. No constraint on content except size.

Project Creation...completed form

Project Creation...completed form

First box contains data about worklog estimated and done. Worklogs are related to assignments. From here you can also access to the task plan. The milestones box contains the milestones list, taken from the entire branch below the current task. Every milestone is always associated to a project start/end. The tree box will show the project bird-view. Statistics box summarizes every figure relevant for the task; data in this box will give you the feel of the real progress of the task. Additional data are shown in the last box. The solution supports custom forms; if some of these are filled you will see them here, as links. The last information available in the task editor page is the task summary bar: In this bar you will see the task dates scope, eventually the milestones (the diamonds), progress (the yellow part), and today (the blue bar). By comparing progress and current date you can see immediately if you are in late or not, just by looking whether the blue line is on green or yellow. In order to create child (or brother) tasks just press create button:

Deleting a project/task

Deleting a project/task..continued
Usually removing complex objects such tasks or resources can have several consequences; most of the objects are linked to each other (a resource is assigned on a task with a role, a task is part of a tree, there is worklog already inserted, there are other users listening for events and much more), so before deleting an object, the solution will check the state and show you the real situation. In this case solution will tell you that this task has 4 direct children, and you have to choose what to do with them. You can: Unlink: this means that children will be promoted as root task Move to parent: task children will become children of task parent (children will pulled up one level) Delete branch: this means that deletion will propagate to the descendants You can select the radio to apply your action to every item. The highlighted area reports the object linked that will be lost while removing the task. If you are not worried by the message you can select one option and try to remove the task definitively by clicking on the delete and proceed button. There are some cases where deletion may fail, when the task has live references from external objects, references which cannot be removed by default; when this happens, the deletion preview pops-up again with an error message.

Task tree editor

Task tree editor..continued

When you are setting up a complex project with many subtasks and detailed tree structure, you may find it useful to edit/create/modify many tasks at once; the project tree editor is meant to do exactly this. The editor will show the tree starting from the task you have selected, so you can see the entire tree if you are on the root or only some part (a branch) if you are on a sub project. You can change status, code, name, dates, milestones, assignee and then save each changed line by pressing the save link at the end of the line, or all-linestogether by pressing the save all button. If you want to create child tasks just press the add button on the parent line. You can remove every subtask (except the root), in this case its children will be pulled up. A line of this tree is a simplified view of the full editor described before, and in some cases you could see behavior on dates or states that reflect dependencies that are not visible in this page. This editor is intended mainly for quick setup/maintenance of the project tree, if you need to refine the structure with dependencies, go through the main editor; you can access it directly by using the scroll button

Project/Task Assignment
Once a task is created we have to assign one or more person

working on it. Assignments in the solution are very important: when you assign a resource you will also implicitly define roles of the task. In fact every assignment is weighted by a local role that gives permissions to the assignee. Permissions are, by default, propagated to descendants, so if you are PM on the root you have PM permissions everywhere, but if you are assigned on a child you can act on the child, not on the parent. The easiest way to do this is to click the task people.. button:

Project/Task Assignment...cont
Youcanchoosetoaddyourselfonthetask,addaprojectmanager,oraddsomeoneelse.Byclickingonaddmeyouget:

Project/Task Assignment...cont
This is the assignment editor page. Here you can choose a resource, and the role played in this task; both are mandatory. You can also create resources directly by typing name and surname

Then you can describe the activity, assign a priority, specify an hourly cost and a cost centre. Regarding the estimation of required work, there are three different ways to proceed: Insert the estimation by hand: a little rough but very effective Insert the estimation using plan Compute it by issues: You can combine these three estimations by checking them: active estimations will be added together computing the total.

Project/Task Assignment...cont
There are three fields that require some explanation: Activity: could be all in one interval or routine. Routine activities can be recorded without interfering with the all-in-one-interval main ones that usually have more focus and relevance. Enabled: in some cases a resource can have long-standing task assigned that dont require activity for a long time. In this case you can disable the assignment (the only effect is that it will be hidden in your working pages like home page, timesheets or my tasks). Risk: this is the risk percentage assigned to the resource relatively to this task. This is used mainly when the assignee is at least in some sense a stakeholder, and you have more than one that are sharing the risk. The cost field reports hourly cost for the chosen resource on this assignment. If you create a new assignment, the price set in global settings is first copied in the assignment editor, but as soon as you pick a resource for the assignment which has a cost set, you will see the cost field updated. The hourly rate is copied into the assignment at creation, but if you update the general price of the resource, the already existing assignments will intentionally not be updated, as you may have set that price as an exception. Our idea is that the same resource may have different costs on different assignments, as it is often the case in the real world.

Project/Task Assignment...cont
The subscription box

Here you can subscribe the assignee (push subscription) to listen to some events, so to receive messages on the chosen media channel.

Project/Task Assignment...cont
By saving the assignment you will get back to the assignment list:

Project Resources
Introduction
The Project Management Software solution helps organize work of groups of people: we usually refer to people as precious resources well, resources. Using the solution you can add and then manage every resource involved in your projects. You can decide to use resource management lightly or in depth

by specifying less or more data. If you decide to use it in depth, the solution will also keep your contact list, or better your organigram (organisations structure). Basically a resource is defined by its name and thats it. Lets see how to create a new resource by using the resource editor. Editing In order to create a resource you must have permission to do so. By clicking on the resources button on the bar you will see your colleagues (if any) and the most important buttons for now, new person and new company

Project Resources...continued
We need two buttons because the solution will

manage both users and companies, and because these two entities are similar but not identical, for instance a company cannot act in our solution, cannotlogin, and a user cannot contain a department, but both can be assigned tasks/projects.

Project Resources...continued
Creating users
Creating a new user: press the new person button:

Project Resources...continued
Creating a company/department Company/Department are both resources and in the solution there is no substantial difference between them. You can create a company with many departments and each department can contain as many resources (yes, resources that can be persons or companies or departments); by structuring your company you get your organigram and some other nice features, like workgroups, that will be described in the following.

Project Resources...continued
Creating a company/department Take a look at a company form with data filled:

Cost Management
Cost monitoring is a relevant aspect of project

management. In the solution cost management is mainly focused on tracking work costs, but has also some additional features that let PMs form a complete overview. Costs are tracked for all tasks, and from a root it is easy to get an overview of the overall costs for that branch.

Cost Management...continued

Cost Management...continued
First of all notice that each task can have a budget, costs from

worklog, and eventually also additional costs. Costs and budgets from children are collected to the parent, so you can decide whether to insert them as split on children or aggregated on the parent. By clicking on the checkboxes you can change the behavior of the page and, accordingly, the values of sums. Here you can change hourly costs for you assignment, and add new additional costs by clicking add cost button. Additional cost data can be modified and will be saved by clicking on save cost. You can remove additional cost by clicking on the delete icon. To access and modify the cost page you need specific permissions on the task; usually only Project Managers can see it.

Printing Reports
Once in task editor general tab you can print a report

of your task. By clicking on the print/export report button:

Printing Reports ...continued

Conclusion
This deliverable documented the high-level,

conceptual vision of the Project Management Software solution. There are some concepts of the solution that we did not touch on, because they require to be explained in greater detail and form part of the concepts already described. Further details will be provided should they are required.