Audience

System administrators, project managers, team members

Benefits

• Be taught what each field in the project add form means
• Understand what you use the fields for

Transcript

This is the project add/edit form that allows entry of your high level project or template information.

Start by giving your project a name. Your team may want to decide upon a naming convention for projects as a way to keep organized and consistent.

Enter in a detailed description for the project. Keep in mind that you may also attach a complete project scope document to the documents repository as well. However, the description section will allow you to report on that field and other fields in the form.

You may select the project team members and project managers from the list here. Notice that you can shorten a list by typing in a few characters of the person’s name. Then double click the name to select that person as a project participant.

If your team uses executive sponsors, you can associate your project with the right sponsor by selecting that person’s name from the select list.

You may categorize your projects by type, which is useful as you can roll up your portfolio by project type in the reports section.

Project Insight will populate the project start date with today’s date. You can input the actual project start date, or you may decide to change the date later.

Project Insight allows you to set up global calendars that account for the organization’s holidays and other non-working times. Applying the global calendar to a project will assure that tasks are not scheduled on your non-working days.

For example, if the majority of the project team is located in Canada which has different holidays than the U.S. team, the administrator may put in a calendar for that country. A project manager may then opt to anchor the schedule with that calendar.

You may anchor your project in a specific time zone as well. This will display all task start and end times in that time zone. Team members may also be given a primary time zone so that the times of projects and tasks display in their proper time zone. This is performed in the user profile form.

If this is an upcoming project, you may leave it in the ‘planning’ state. This keeps the tasks from being distributed to the team members’ portal pages and allows you to assign and re-assign tasks without notifying any team members. When the project is ready to begin, select the ‘active’ project state. This distributes the tasks to the team members and makes the project appear on your team members’ dashboard.

When the project ends, change the state to archive. This will remove the project from team members’ dashboards. You can still report on all archived projects in the system.

If you are creating a project template, then select the radio button ‘template.’ This will cause the project to appear in the drop down list ‘copy from template’ on the project add/edit form after it has been saved.

You will notice a state named ‘to be deleted.’ This is a feature that protects project managers from accidentally deleting a project. If you need to delete a project, then the project must be first put into this state, and then deleted.

The project status indicators display the ‘red, yellow, green’ traffic light indicators for a project. These are set up in the Administration section by an administrator. The status may be changed by the project manager using his or her own judgment. These indicators are subjective in nature and are different from the automatic health indicators, which are quantitative measurements.

A status description may be filled out if you need to provide further explanation about the project status.

The ‘at risk’ field simply designates that the project may be at risk. If you are building a template, then do not check it. However, you may use this during project execution. This field also displays in the portfolio reports and provides information to executives about which projects in the portfolio are deemed at risk.

Then click Save