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About Lookup Lists and Status Lists

Users with administrative privileges can add/edit values for existing lookup or status lists, and create new lookup lists.

Lookup lists and Status lists are lists of values that you can associate with fields. Users can then select a value from a list when specifying a value for the field. You view and configure status and lookup lists on Admin/Setup/Lookup Lists.

Status Lists

You can associate status lists with Status fields only (standard LL Status List type fields). You cannot create new status lists, but you can update the values of the provided list.

PPM Pro provides the following set of status lists:

  • Asset Status
  • Department Status
  • Enterprise Status (was Account)
  • HRIssue Status
  • Material Estimate Status
  • Portfolio Status
  • Project Status
  • Request Status
  • Task Status

Implied Status

Status lists have a property called "implied status". An implied status is an umbrella status that maps to one or more statuses, and is a way to consolidate multiple status types to one type. For example, imagine you have the following project statuses: Proposed, In Progress, Paused, and Late. All of those statuses can be mapped to projects that are open - in other words they have an implied status of Open (because they are not closed).

There are three implied status values:  Open, Closed, and Proposed. You must map every status value you create to one of these implied status values. The notion of implied status simplifies reporting and filtering because it gives you a way to aggregate like entities. Implied status is also useful for driving some business logic for timesheets. 

For example, you might need the granularity of status values such as "Planning", "In Review", or "Phase 1," but they all have the commonality of referring to an open entity (project, for example), and as such, have an implied status of Open. Likewise, "Canceled" and "Complete" both refer to Closed tasks or projects.

For filters, implied status simplifies the filter statement by allowing you to use "entity: Implied Status" instead of listing every single status value that might apply.

Special Behavior for Closed Project Status

There are various views in the user interface that automatically filter out projects with an implied status of Closed; that is, Closed projects are not displayed and their data is not included in capacity and demand calculations. For example, the Resource Workbench does not include closed projects in capacity and demand calculations. Remember that you can give other statuses an implied status of Closed and they too will be withheld. For example, perhaps you do not want to see or include any projects with a status of Hold (which is an Implied Closed status) in capacity and demand calculations. The following areas/features do not consider projects with status of Implied Closed:

  • Resource Workbench
  • Find Demand
  • KPI reports
  • Home/Issues
  • Home/Tasks
  • What If

Note that timesheet rules can be written to include/exclude closed projects; reports, Capacity & Demand facility can use filters to include/exclude closed projects.

Lookup Lists

Lookup Lists can be associated with user-defined fields on request, portfolio, asset, task, or project entities.

PPM Pro provides the following set of lookup lists

Addl Contact Email/Phone Email Type Contact Type Material Estimate Type Project Log Priority Request Priority Task Complexity
Addl Contact Email/Phone Phone Type Dashboard Type Project Business Objective Project Log Type Request Status Task Phase
Associated Address Type Division Type Project Investment Type Project Phase Resource Lookup list TBD Task Priority
Associated Contact Type Enterprise Activity Type Project Log Budget Impact Project Priority Resource Type Task Type
Attachment Category Enterprise Lead Source Project Log Complexity Project Risk Roles Task Work Effort
Baseline Type Enterprise Type Project Log Phase Project Type Task Budget Impact Timesheet Administrative Time Types

Default values are provided for almost all lookup and status Lists; you can edit or delete the default values as you see fit to better match your organizational terminology and processes.

 

Lookup Lists and Reports

If you include a lookup list field in a list report, you will have the option to configure the visual display of the list value in the report. While you configure the visual treatment in the report definition, the actual colors and icons are configured in Admin/Setup/Lookup Lists. See Colors and Icons, and Configure Lookup Lists (in reports). Note that color/icons are not available for multi-select lists (it's not feasible to specify a color when choosing multiple items).