[PPM User Guide: Project Managers]


WorkOtter User Guide: Project Managers

Purpose

Login

Dashboard

Create Project

Update Project

Resource & Role Association

Manage Workplan/Tasks

Project Financials

Gantt View

Project Lifecycle Stage

Project Dashboard

Enter Timesheet

Submitting Timesheet

Proxy Timesheet

Approve Timesheet

Purpose

This document serves as the User Guide for the New PPM tool (WorkOtter) specific to the role of the Project Managers (PMs). It is noteworthy to mention that the new PPM tool has been configured and automated by creating predefined Project and workplan templates to reduce most of themanual efforts for PMs.

It is always recommended that the Project Managers should pay special care while populating the fields mentioned in following sections during Project creation to avoid any data issues.

PMs are responsible for the following duties in new PPM platform - all these topics will be covered in the following sections along with the relevant screenshots for easy reference.

  • Creating a New project
  • Create a workplan relevant to the project
  • Associate tasks for the project
  • Associate resources and roles for the project
  • Managing Gantt View
  • Populate the project financials
  • Managing Gantt View of the Project
  • Understanding Project Lifecycle Stage and Role of PM
  • Enter Timesheet
  • Proxy timesheet entry for the team members and
  • Approve the timesheets for the resources

Login

Users should access the Production URL provided by WorkOtter or filling and submitting their weekly timesheets. If you are SSO enabled, users should be automatically logged into the new PPM platform using their SSO page. There is no need to separately input the credentials.

Dashboard

PMs should be landing on the Dashboard page (below screenshot) after clicking the SSO URL with the “Project Manager”tab displayed by default. PMs can also navigate to the tabs of “Team Member” and “My Reports”to view the relevant information.

Dashboard provides a consolidated snapshot of all the projects managed by the PM along with their Current Status, Lifecycle stage and Planned End dates.

This page also furnishes different sections that populate theMilestones, Risks, Issues and Overdue Workplan Itemsin its main window.

The left pane of the window lists down the Projects and Assigned worksfor the PM.

The different links and sections will be explained below for providing an overview of the Dashboard page:

  1. My Projects & Requests
  1. Requests|Manage: Number of requests raised by the PM.
  2. Entered Projects: Number of projects entered in the platform by the PM.
  3. Assigned Projects: Number of Projects to which the PM has been assigned.
  4. Completed Projects: Number of projects which have been completed for which the user was assigned as the Project Manager.
  5. Set Project Status: Displays the list of projects and provides the ability to the PM to create the status report for the projects.
  1. My Assigned Work
  1. Tasks: Number of tasks (allocated in the Workplan for the Projects) to the PM.
  2. Risks: Number of risk associated to the projects handled by the PM.PM can also add a risk to a project by clicking the + sign alongside the Risk link.
  3. Issues:Number of issues associated to the projects handled by the PM. PM can also add a risk to a project by clicking the + sign alongside the Issues link.
  4. Changes (Scope): Number of changes in scope for the projects. PM can document the scope changes for the projects by clicking the + sign and populating the details.
  1. My Managed Projects
  1. ID: Project ID assigned by the system when a new project is created.
  2. Project: Title of the projects for which the user is the PM.
  3. Status: RYG status of the projects which can be modified by the PM by accessing Set Project Status link (mentioned under My Projects & Requestssection).
  4. Planned End:Planned end dates for each project. These dates are populated based on the Project template used during the project creation and the workplan end date.
  5. Open Milestones Tab: Lists down any open milestones for the projects managed by the PM.
  6. Overdue Workplan Items Tab: Populates the workplan items which has not been closed even after their designated end dates.
  7. High Priority Issues Tab: Shows the list of issues which are of high priority as entered by the PM through the Issueslink (mentioned under My Assigned Worksection).
  8. High Exposure Risks: Lists down all the high exposure risks documented by the PM for the projects by accessing the Risks link under My Assigned Work section.

Create Project

Users can create a new project in the new PPM tool by navigating to “New Project” sub-menu under Project menu item at the top of the landing page.

It is advisable to populate correct information in different fields of this form/page which is crucial for proper tracking of the project.

User will be navigated to New Project Request formon clicking the link – the fields on this page need to be carefully populated before Submitting the request in the system.

User need to fill up all the Mandatory fields in the form and hit “Save and Continue” button at the bottom of the form to submit the new project request.

The field names along with their descriptions are provided below for ready reference:

Mandatory Fields

  1. Title: Descriptive name for the project. Max character length is 255.
  2. Product:Select the best suitable Product group under which this project can be classified.
  3. Description:The summary of the purpose of the project. Max character length is 4000.
  4. Theme:A project may follow a basic Corporate Theme. Select the Theme best suited for your project.
  5. Project Manager: Project Manager for the Project. By default it selects the PM of the logged in user. Select correct PM name here.
  6. Initiated By:The person who initiated the project proposal or new project entry. Selects the logged in User by default. Select a different person as appropriate.
  7. Email Team Notifications:Determines whether emails will be automatically generated to team members and project managers when there are updates to the project information. Select “Yes” for easy tracking/auditing.
  8. Billed Department: The name of the organization requesting the project to whom the billing for this project will be done. By default, it takes the department of the logged in user. Make sure to choose the correct value here.
  9. Responsible Org (Primary):Responsible Org defines the Department who is responsible to implement this project. By default, it takes the department of the logged in user. Make sure to choose the correct value here.
  10. Category:Category defines the Objective of the Project -- whether to Run or Change the Business.
  11. Life of Project Cost:Select the value based on the Duration, Size & Cost of this Project. Make sure this value matches the "Template Project" selected for your project.
  12. Business Priority: Select the Priority of the Project in line with the value selected for "Life of Project Cost" field.
  13. Capitalized:Select Capitalized or Expense based on the nature of your project. Make sure the value matches with the "Template Project" selected on this form.
  14. System:Select the System which is most impacted by this project.
  15. Project Duration:Select the value based on the Duration of the project -- this should be inline with the value selected for "Life of Project Cost" field.
  16. Benefit: Defines the Primary Benefit associated with this Project.
  17. Budget Capital: Provide an amount of budget capital for the project
  18. Budget Expense: Populate an amount of budgeted expenses for the project
  19. Financial Tracking Type:Determines whether or not financials will be tracked on a project. Default value is set as Internal Budget.

Optional (Non-Mandatory) Fields

  1. Project Number: The rules for this section are based on your internal controls.
  2. Template Project:Select the correct Template based on the Cost, Duration & Size of your project. Templates store generic core set of roles, resources, tasks, and deliverables.
  3. Program:The program name to which the project will be associated. Select the program based on the selection of Responsible Org (Primary).
  4. Billing Type:Whether this project is T&M or Fixed Bid -- most of the projects should be T&M.

Update Projectfields

Once the New Project request form is submitted, the project gets created in the platform and an ID gets associated to it. User automatically lands to the project view page.

The left pane of the page is the Project Toolbox and the main view is the Project Dashboard.

The project information can be updated by clicking the Updateicon present at the top of the Project Dashboard.

Update Viewallows to modify the values for only some of the UDF fields (& not all the parameters).

User can update the UDF field values if there have been any mistakes while creating the project.

Resource & Role Association

After the Project Request gets created in the platform, next step would be associate the Roles/Team members to the project.If using a templateand it is chosen on the request form at the time of project creation has the generic roles embedded which gets automatically associated to the project. Also, the Project Manager selected during project creation gets associated as a Team member for the project.

The Team/Roles for the project can be configured by clicking the link from the Project Toolbox as shown in the below screenshot:

Clicking on the Team/Roles link opens the Resource page but clicking on the + sign opens the page from where team members can be added to the project.

User can navigate to Team/Roles link and then Add/Delete team members for the project by clicking the “Add Roles or Team” Or “Edit Team” buttons respectively.

On Clicking the “Add Roles or Team” link, the below screen opens up from where the RolesorTeam Members can be searched and added to the project team.

On adding the resources, User is navigated to the Team assignments page as shown below where the newly added team members will be appearing.

Next, we need to perform the “Manage Plan” activity which is very important from timesheet as well as forecasting perspective.

Manage Workplan/Tasks

The Workplan containing the generic Tasks are assigned automatically to the project based on the selection of Template during project creation step.

Generic Roles, Plan Start, Plan End, Plan Hrs. also get associated automatically to individual tasks based on the selection of theTemplate earlier.

The Workplancontains the items categorized as Task/Deliverable/Milestone each of which has Plan Start date, Plan End date, Pln Hrs., and Assignments associated with them.

Initially, the Assignmentsdisplay the associated Rolesfor each task. However, once the Resourceis assigned to the task, Assignment column will display the resource names.

Clicking on any line item/task on this page will open up a new window on which the updates/ modifications can be performed.

After any modification done in this window, press the “X” icon to close & save the changes.

The different fields which may be updated for a task are provided below for ready reference:

  1. Item Name: Descriptive name for the Task/Deliverable/Milestone
  2. Type:Item type of the line item. Can be Task/Deliverable/Milestone
  3. RYG Status:Signifies whether the task is in Green, Yellow or Red status.
  4. Status:Whether the item is in Open or Close status.
  5. Plan Start:The planned start date for the task as populated in the template (which was selected during project creation). Make sure to modify this based on your good judgement.
  6. Planned End: The planned end date for the task as populated in the template (which was selected during project creation). Make sure to modify this based on your good judgement.
  7. Assignments: This is the most important section which facilitates the Resource allocation to the tasks along with the duration and efforts. The relevant fields are as below –
  8. Owner: Select the resource/person from the drop down list which shows all the resources added during Resource Allocation activity.Make sure the Roles match the Owner name.
  9. Status: Should be Open or Closed. Defaults to Closed if the Plan hours is Zero.
  10. Pln Hrs: Default value is 8 hrs. PM has to manually change the plan hours for each resource allocated to the task.
  11. Rem Hrs: Remaining hours is auto calculated by subtracting the Actual hours from the planned hours. PMs don’t need to enter anything here.
  12. Act Hrs: Actual hours are non-editable and they get populated based on the entered timesheet hours by the resource.
  13. Start Date: The date is populated based on the selected template. PM has to manually change the Start date for each allocated resource based on his good judgement.
  1. End Date: The date is populated based on the selected template. PM has to manually change the End date for each allocated resource based on his good judgement.
  2. Delete icon: The delete icon present against each row of assignments help the user to delete any assignment completely.
  1. Details: This is the description of the Task/Item which is prepopulated in the template. PMs can modify this text based on their project profile.
  2. Comments: PMs can add any comments relevant to the task/deliverable/milestone here. They can also attach any relevant useful documents by clicking the attach icon present in this section.
  3. Date Time: Another important section which needs to be populated by the PMs for accurate forecasting and project progress. The editable fields are mentioned below:
  4. Actual Start: Please provide the Actual start day of the Task/Item here. If not sure, keep it blank but make sure to populate it before the start of the Project.
  5. Actual End: Please keep it blank initially. However, this date needs to be populated and informed to PMO for marking the project complete.
  6. Pln Hrs: The value in this field is the sum of planned efforts for all the team members taken together calculated from the Assignments section above.
  7. Financials: We shall cover the financials part in a separate section below.

Project Financials

Project financials are an important aspect of Project management.

There are two heads under which the Project Financials are loaded in the PPM platform – the Financialstab on the Project Dashboarddisplays the costs associated with the project:

  1. Labor Costs: This cost is derived by the hours booked against a project by the resources and their hourly labor rates set up in the system.
  2. Non Labor Costs: This is the sum of costs associated to the deliverables like Software, Hardware and Professional services. PM needs to enter the actual cost at the task level for the project.

When the user clicks on the Plan (Tasks)link under Project Toolbox, the workplan window opens and the tasks/deliverables associated with the project are displayed.

After the resource allocations have been completed for all the tasks along with the Cap/ Exp. classifications for individual tasks, the workplan page would look like below – and then comes some of the interesting features including Gantt View as discussed in next section.

Gantt View

The Gantt view of the Workplan provides the graphical representation of the duration of the tasks, Deliverables and Milestones. WO has a very user friendly and informative Gantt view of the tasks which can be accessed by clicking the Show Gantt link (as shown in the above screenshot).

Once the Gantt chart is loaded, all the Workplan Items will be appearing alongside the line items in the graphical view on the right hand side of the window.

Some of the important features of the Gantt chart window in WO is mentioned below for ready reference:

  • On hovering the mouse over any horizontal bar, would highlight and display the Task name, WBS number, Plan Start date, Plan End date, Status, RYG status, Critical Path and Dependency information. This is a very helpful user experience as all such info is readily available without navigating away from the page.
  • The background color against each line depicts the type of the work item. For Task, the background color is white; for Deliverable it is Orange and for Milestone, the color is light yellow.
  • The view of the Gantt chart can be modified by selecting appropriate dropdown value (Semester, Trimester, Month, Week, Day) from the Scale field present at the bottom of the page.
  • Update View button at the bottom of the page needs to be clicked to refresh the Gantt view after any making any changes.
  • Critical Path checkbox present at the bottom shows the criticality of an item in red line & arrow in the Gantt chart (refer the above screenshot).
  • Show Dependencies checkbox at the bottom of the page reflects the processor information and is shown by Purple color lines and arrows.

The workplan items can be modified directly from the Gantt chart itself. Below mentioned steps can be performed for updating the Task level information from Gantt view:

  • Double-click on any horizontal bar graph will make that task active for edit/update. The corresponding row at the left side will also change to edit mode.
  • Hovering the top half of the bar would change the mouse icon from hand to adjust – dragging withthe mousenow would move both the start and end dates in past or future keeping the duration unchanged.
  • Hovering the start or end of the bar would change the mouse icon from hand to double arrow – dragging with mouse now would move either the start or the end date hence affecting the duration of the task.
  • Hovering over the circles present at the start or end of the bar, and dragging them up or down would create a new start or finish dependency for the tasks.