Project Management System

Posted by Myles Chippendale on Thu Sep 10 5:08:47 1998

What do we need for Project Management?
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This message sets out some thoughts about the requirements for a web
based project management system along the lines of the Paneris web
site and the I-Way timesheet system. It is thought that a more usable
and useful system can be created by integrating currently existing
systems with some new components. I am at the start of the process
of specificing such a system and would greatly appreciate anyone's
input to incorporate it into the spec.

Objects
-------

As far as I can see at the moment, there are several types of entity
that we will need in the system. These include:

- People
(principally Paneris and I-Way staff - not customers)

- A Diary/Availability system for each person
- A timesheet/invoicing system for each person
- A PO system

- Projects

- A message board or e-mail system for communication about projects.
- A document store for specifications, notes on development, etc.
- A Task list (cf Paneris To-Do list) of individual actions that
need to be monitored.

Note that although Diaries and Invoices are most closely associated
with a single person, they are intimately connected with projects,
in particular tasks and POs (for instance, people could "book" someone on
the diary to complete a task).

Question : Have I missed anything?

What Do People Want To See?
---------------------------

What do people want this system to do? Here are some guesses:

What I (as a programmer for I-Way) would want to see includes:

- Status of Project(s) that I am involved in, including
- A "project status" paragraph which must be kept up to date!
- Any outstanding actions or tasks for me
- Any outstanding actions or tasks for others
- New messages/documents since I last looked at the site

(this should be the contents of a "summary" screen - full details
should be accessible as well)

- My invoices
- My Diary
- My tasks
- Other peoples' Diaries
- Other peoples' tasks

Can anyone think of other things? In particular I think that
Simon will need summary screens for each person as well as project.
What should be on them to give the status of projects "at a glance"?

My Thoughts on The sytem
------------------------

Just briefly, the way I see the system working is that you log on and
get a summary screen showing the information listed under "What Do
People Want To See?" as well as the proposed links to invoices, etc.

There would also be two other main pages : "People" and "Projects" that
would allow people to see full details (subject to access level) of all
people and projects, perhaps with appropriate summary screens (status
of projects, oustanding actions, availability summary for people, what
else?).

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES:
---------------------

I feel that the approach to the system should be to make things as
simple, and therefore fexible, as possible. If we find that we are
doing the same things repeatedly, we can customise at that point
rather than insisting that things are done in one particular way
from the outset. This refers to ways of working with the web site,
not necessarily ways of working on projects, although the idea is
that the web site will (help to) formalise the way in which projects
happen.

I personally would like to integrate e-mail and (web) message boards
more closely than at present (in particular I would like to post
messages to message boards from e-mail).

I think that documents should be handled in much the same way as
attachments to e-mail, i.e. You upload a document by sending a message
to the message board including the document. This gives us a simple
document control system (documents are never updated, just new versions
uploaded), it gives us the ability to include more comments about a
document (in the message) than just its title, and it gives us a
timestamp on document uploads.

Authentication/password protection has now made it's debut on the
Paneris site. I think that we can build a more flexible system by
explicitly marking the permissions on messages/documents/tasks/diaries.
The catagories could be:

* Internal I-Way correspondance - not for customers or the public
* Internal Project correspondance - can be viewed by customers, but
not by the public
* Normal correspondance - Can be viewed by anyone

I anticipate the site being accessed by entering your username/password
before seeing any of this internal I-Way/Paneris stuff, much as on the
I-way timesheet. We could give customers a guest password so that they
could follow project development whilst being restricted from accessing
sensitive information.

If anything is not clear or you have any comments about all of this,
then please let me know,

Regards,

Myles

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