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About Projects

A project is composed of tasks and a  project team. When you create a task, you can bud­get and/or estimate costs, revenue, and hours. If you are implementing project-level resource planning, a project can also have allocations. For more information about projects see Project Basics and Working with the Project List page.

All Projects

The Project/All Projects page lists each project within your organization. Note that exactly what a user can see depends on how your PPM Pro administrator has configured the project and the user's permissions. For example, this documentation might reference pages that your organization is not using, or that you don't have permission to view.

From the project list you can open an individual project to view more detailed information, as well as toggle on/off the Gantt chart.

  • List View (toggle Gantt off)  - The list view displays a list of projects that match your filter criteria. If your organization uses multiple project categories, you can arrange your grids (add/remove columns, change order) differently for each category. See Customizing the List Contents by Category.

  • Gantt Chart (toggle Gantt on) - The projects Gantt Chart view displays a time line chart that contains all projects that match your filter criteria. You can display Gantt bars in different colors based on distinct values that are displayed in the grid ("Color by"), and can include a legend at the bottom of the page. Similar to the Task view Gantt chart and the Gantt report, users can zoom in/zoom out and print the multi-project Gantt chart. The chart displays bars for planned dates (from Start Date to Target Date) and actual dates (from Start Date to Complete Date).

You can also configure reports to display multi-project Gantt charts and incorporate them into dashboards.

Editing Multiple Projects

Use the bulk editor to update multiple projects at one time. See Using the Bulk Editor.

Viewing Individual Projects

To view a project, either double-click the row or select the row and choose Actions > Open (or right-click and choose Open from the right-click menu).

The project view opens, and what you see in that view depends on how your project category has been configured.

See Working with the Project View for more information.

Superset of Project Sections

The sections that you can view depend on whether they have been configured for your projects and if they are configured, whether you have permission to view them.

Section

Descriptions

Details

Contains general information about the project. The exact fields that appear on this screen depends on how your admin configured the page.

Additional Details

This page is available to organizations who wish to add another page of information. You can rename this page.

Financials Contains project-level financial entries. Each financial entry category allows for both forecasts and actuals, is either cost/expense/cash "outflow" or revenue/income/cash "inflow", and can have a different set of fields and various sections.

Staffing

The Staffing screen allows you to allocate roles to a project either with specific resources assigned to the roles, or simply with resource placeholders. These placeholders can have estimated dates and demand, just like actual resources. This allows you to create role demand without having to specify individual contributors. See About Project-Level Resource Planning.

Billing Rates

(If Bill Rate feature is enabled) Each project has an associated billing rate table that is populated with a billing rate for each role/resource you allocate to the project. Once you have allocated a role/resource, you can modify the associated billing rate on the Billing Rates page; any changes you make will apply in the current project. See Billing Rates.

Tasks

The Tasks section contains the tasks created for the project. Tasks are executable actions that are assigned to resources and/or roles. See Working with the Tasks View.

Project Logs

The Project Logs section (sometimes referred to as Issues or Risks)  is where you can document or track certain aspects of a project, such as risks, problems, change order, bugs, or general issues. Project logs can optionally be assigned to one or more user to assist with resolution handling, and can have a status or other metadata that does not impact tasks or the parent project. You can configure different categories of project logs, each having a different set of fields and various sections, to meet your needs.

Project-Predecessors

Allows you to create soft dependencies (project dates will not shift) between projects. In addition, if you have created any cross-project task dependencies, the external projects (that contain the predecessor tasks) are listed here as hard dependencies (project dates will shift, if necessary). See Creating Soft Project Dependencies.

Portfolios

Link, or connect a project to a portfolio. You can specify the percentage (%) of budgets and actuals that will be rolled up from the project to the portfolio. For example, if a project was being funded by 2 different divisions, you could show that by applying to 2 different portfolios with 50% each. See Adding a Portfolio to a Project.

Notes

Add threaded notes to project. See Adding Notes.

Status Comments

 

Attachments

Attach files or links to files to a project. See Attaching Files and URL Links to an Entity.

Baselines

Capture snapshots of project data for comparison. See About Baselines.

Reports

Create and run project-level reports. See Working with the Reports List page.

Dashboards

Create and run project-level dashboards. See Working with the Dashboards List page.

Rollups

 

Team

Project teams are groups of users that have permissions defined by their corresponding permissions profile. See Creating Project Teams.

Alerts

Configure project alerts for projects and child entities, such as tasks, issues, and team members. See Creating Alerts.

Settings

Additional project fields - typically fields that you might want to restrict access to. The fields that appear on this section are set up by your PPM Pro administrator.

Tasks

A project is made up of one or many tasks. You can create a project plan that has multiple levels of tasks. You can assign task teams, roles, and material expenses.

Summary tasks are the top-level tasks in any PPM Pro project. They are used to define the billing type for all of the tasks that fall under a particular Summary Task. See About Tasks.

Dates

Project dates roll up from tasks as follows:

  • the project Start Date rolls up from the earliest summary task Start Date
  • the project Target Date rolls up from the latest summary task End Date

The project's Complete Date is the actual date the project finished. When a date is entered, the project's % Complete goes to 100%.

Projects can span across a maximum of 20 years from today() - today's date. This means that a project could span more than 20 years as long as it does not go into 20 years from today() - today's date. Duration can't exceed 7,300 days. A message showing that it can't span more than 20 years will display if this scenario happens.