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Audience
Project Insight administrators
Description
Project Insight is a flexible and powerful project solution. The flexibility comes from allowing Project Insight administrators to determine the settings of the software in case you need to use options other than the defaults. If you are an administrator, designated support contact or project manager, then you will benefit from this training.
Benefits
- Understand the purpose and meaning behind the configuration options
- Assure that your project management software is set up correctly right out of the gate
Key Points
Transcript
Project Insight as designed with all the core functions that you need to manage your projects from initiation to closing. However, you are also able to set configuration options so that you can adapt the software to meet your business processes 100%. Configuration can be performed by your system administrator. You do not need your IT department or professional services to set up this information.
Incorporate Your Branding and Culture
Change the System Name
One of the first things you can do is change the system name. Changing the name of the software can increase adoption by your team because they are seeing information that is familiar to them.
What you’re seeing here is a typical project management dashboard.
This text at the top of the dashboard, where it says Project Insight, is the system name. You can leave it as Project Insight or you can change it to some standard terminology more recognizable to your users and that incorporates your organization’s brand or organization name.
The second system wide term you can change is the My Insight text.
If you click on the My Insight text, it takes you to your default dashboard.
If you hover on it, you can access the forms you most commonly use with one click.
The My Insight text is accessed a lot in the normal day-to-day use of the system, and you can change that to be something that incorporates your terms or standards.
Click on the left navigation to expand that section.
Click on Administration to expand that.
Click on the System Configuration text.
That expands that section and also brings up the Settings form.
The first option on this form is the System Name.
This is a required field. You always have to have something in here.
Erase the words Project Insight and type in ABC Company because you want the name of your organization to show. You could enter something like ABC Company’s PMO or the name of your group, whatever makes sense. Just remember this is global.
Next, change the My Insight Text.
Erase the My Insight text and type in ABC Insight.
Click Save.
You can now see that My Insight has been changed to ABC Insight.
Click on ABC Insight to return to your dashboard.
You can also see that the System name now shows as ABC Company.
That is some very easy ways you can set up Project Insight to make it more recognizable to your team and other stakeholders.
Changing Logos and Color Schemes
You can also insert your own logos and change the color scheme to brand the software.
Click on the arrow next to Customization to expand that section.
Click on Theme.
You can see that you can change the System Name and My Insight Text right from this form as well.
It is another place to do the same thing and it often makes sense to change it from the Theme form, because this is where you can also select your own logos and color schemes.
Click on the drop down for theme. You can see there are a lot of different predefined color themes you can apply to your system.
You can experiment with this by clicking on different options. If you want to revert to the default, just change it back to No Selection.
Click on the white space on the form to exit it out of there without changing anything.
This is where you also can upload your own logos.
There are various places, including the logo here in the top left corner, which is a graphic file.
And the graphic here, displayed next to ABC Insight.
And on your login screen as well.
Change Languages and Customize Terminology
You are also able to change not only those terms you’ve seen here, but you can also change the terminology associated with almost every label in Project Insight.
You do this in the Customize section, Culture and Interface Labels.
You can enter own culture or nomenclature. You can set up an entirely different languages as well, if you have team members that are located in different geographical locations.
Translating the software is covered in detail in the Internationalize Your Project Software with Cultural and Interface Labels training session.
Branding the Project Insight software by entering your terminology, colors and logos, is very flexible and easy to do without any custom programming.
Create a Team Login Message
There are a few more simple ways you can set up Project Insight to be tailored to your organization.
In the Administration section, click on Login Message.
On the Project Insight login form, you can put your own personalized team messages.
Click the plus sign icon to add a Login Message.
Enter the Name of the message.
This name is the internal Project Insight name, not what your team members see. You want to make it descriptive and identifiable to system administrators for on-going management of these messages.
Type in April 2015 Message – Log your time reminder.
The Title is the text that your team members and other stakeholders will see when they login.
Enter – Time Entry Reminder.
The Message Body is where you set up the detailed messages that displays.
This can be very simple or very complex. You can paste information from a Word document, and you can also add all kinds of formatting.
You can insert pictures, flash animations, links to external site, tables, symbols and other media.
Keep this one simple.
Type in - Remember to enter your time by 4:00 Friday.
Highlight it and click the bold icon.
Also, click on the Foreground color and change it to red.
Now you must also enter a date that it should start appearing.
Click on the Calendar icon and choose today’s date as the Publishing Date.
Click Save.
That Login Message is now listed.
You can enter multiple messages with the same date. However, only one will show at one time on the Login form and that is the current one according to the publish date. Or if they are the same publish date, it would be the last message entered.
A best practice is to only have one message per publish date.
To see that it will look like, click the Preview text.
A new form opens and shows you the login page with the message
Disable the Login Page
You will notice on the login page there are some other messages showing as well. These are the login page news that comes directly from the Project Insight team. It is valuable as it will show your team free webinars, videos and training, as well as inform you of upcoming product releases.
If for some reason you do not wish to have this information display, you can disable it.
Leave this form open, and click back on the main Project Insight form.
Click on System Configuration again.
Scroll down to Disable Login News.
Click on it, to disable the news feed on the login form.
Click Save.
Click back on the other form.
Click F5 to refresh it.
Now only your login message appears.
One more thing before you close this form. You may change the login logo that you saw earlier.
Click the X to close this form.
Setting Your Default Time Zone
You will also want to set your organization’s default time zone.
Click on Formatting, Language & Culture Settings in the System Configuration.
You are able to select the Default System Language & Culture Setting from here as well.
On this same form, you are able to set your default time zone, click in the drop down for the Default Time Zone and set it to the one that you use mostly.
You can also set times zones for individual users and also for individual projects. That is covered in more detail in the Build Your First Project training session.
Click Save.
Decide Project and Issue Numbering
The next options you have here is all about numbering of your items in the software.
Click on System Configuration again.
For Projects, Project Requests, Change Orders, Issues, To Dos, Approvals and documents, you can have Project Insight assign automatically a number to these items.
For a few of the items, such as projects, change orders and issues, you must always have a number assigned to them.
For the other items listed, assigning a number is optional. It is something you can decide if you need numbering or not.
Think of the numbering system as a point of reference number that can give you an approximate idea of the number of projects or other items you have in the software. Project Insight will not re-use old numbers once used. At the same time, if you delete a project, the numbers will similarly not re-adjust. Once an item has a number, it will remain that number.
The number is determined automatically by Project Insight and once set up, you cannot re-number or change that number. However, you can set the starting numbering sequence. By default, item numbering starts at 1, but you could have it start at a 1000 for example, by typing 1000 in the Reset To column for that item.
For example, enter 1000 in the Reset to for Projects.
The next project you add would be assigned 1001 as its number. Project Insight adds a 1 to whatever you set here and uses that as the number for the next item added.
If you have other external systems that you need to have a cross reference number for, then there are other ways to do that with custom controls. You wouldn’t probably use this number for that unless you are pushing out data from Project Insight to the other system. If you are pulling in data, then you probably want a user defined field for that which is covered in more information in the Creating Custom Fields training session.
You may also enter a prefix for the number as well.
For example, enter PRJ because that is the standard prefix you assign to all your project numbers.
Now, the project would get added with the PRJ1001 as the project number.
Erase both the prefix and Reset to leave it as the defaults and see now you can set numbering rules.
Click in the drop down for Project Numbering.
The first option and the default option for numbering is Individual.
Individual means that each item has its own individual numbering sequence.
So Projects are set to individual numbering sequence and so are the Change Orders and Issues.
That means when you add your first project it will be number 1.
When you add your first Change Order, it will be number 1 as well.
When you add your first Issue it will be number 1 too.
That’s because each of those items are set to have their own individual numbering sequence that has nothing to do with the numbering sequence of any other item, they are completely independent.
Click in the drop down for Project Numbering.
The other option is called Global. Click on Global.
If you do not want items to have their own individual numbering sequence, you can set them to create one set of global numbers. You would do this, if you want to have every item in the system assigned a unique number that no other item would ever have that same number.
This option is only really applicable if you have more than one item set to global.
Click in the drop down for Change Order and set that to Global.
Click in the drop down for Issue Numbering and set that to Global.
Now, the numbers for projects, change orders and issues are all issues unique numbers and in sequence.
If you add your first project, it would be number 1.
When you add your first Change Order, it will be number 2, because number 1 is already used.
When you add your first Issue it will be number 3.
A unique number from a global numbering system will be assigned to each item if you have set it up as Global. If you have only one item set to Global, then it is the same as individual numbering, because no other item is also set to Global.
Using that Global is not that common. It is primarily used for integrations, when you want to ensure that every data field you are integrating has a unique number that does not match any other item number in the system. This way there can never be any doubt about what the number refers to.
Copy and Paste Options
Next, are the copy and paste options.
Project Insight contains copy and paste functionality so that you can easily move item. It is a like drag and drop similar to applications like Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.
You can also move and copy and paste items using a Project Insight built-in clipboard.
Your system administrator always has permissions to perform these functions, but you can also give it your team members and other stakeholders by giving them permission options.
Of course, you can only copy and paste items that you have permissions to.
Doing this will depend on your permissions and security settings and what permissions you want to give project managers or team members.
For example, if you turn this on for project managers, them they are able to drag and drop a project to a folder that has different permissions that the original folder. That will result in a project having different permissions than the folder it is in.
If you are really worried about permissions and security and have quite complex security permissions set up, then you may not want to allow this.
You will be notified, if you are moving an item with one set of permissions to a folder with a different set of permissions and you can choose to continue with the move or not.
If you do continue, then you may need to reset the permissions on the project to inherit from the parent item and delete any additional permissions that were set up.
Paste into HTML Inputs
The next option, paste into HTML Inputs. There are some data elements in Project Insight where you can enter in HTML text. This allows you to format items.
If you are cutting and pasting data from a Microsoft Word document into these kinds of fields, you can turn this option on to automatically strip Microsoft Word formatting, otherwise, you have to manually select the option to paste the data as Plain text.
It is not normally checked, unless you have some internal process or policies or you are encountering some issues.
Disable News Feeds
You have already seen what Disable Login News does.
The Disable Dashboard News also disables the news feeds that are available under the help option.
Whenever there is a new version or upgrade, you will get a news feed under the help icon as well.
If you do not want your users to have access to those feeds, you can that option off as well.
And finally, there is the Disable PI Back Button.
That is the icon here at the top of all Project Insight forms that you can click to enable you to go backwards.
If there are security settings or concerns, then you can disable this option. This is usually only done if you are behind a firewall with a corporate on premise installation.
Version
Finally at the very bottom, you have the version number of the software you are running.
This is useful to check your current version number against the list of latest releases to see what new functions there are available to you.
Click Save.
Users Comment Options
The next option that you are going to see are the comment options.
Click on System Configuration.
Click on Comment Settings.
These are the options you may set as to whether or not users can edit or delete the comments they have entered into the software.
All the different types of comments are listed.
Check the option if you want to enable users the ability to edit or delete their own comments that they entered for that type of item.
Uncheck the option, if you want the comments to be a read-only audit trail of what occurred. In this case, if there was a mistake, you would have to enter a new correcting comment instead of editing or deleting the incorrect comment.
Displaying Users’ Photos on a Comment
There is also a checkbox for Photo.
If your users have photos in their user profiles, by checking this the photos will appear next to any comments that they have entered. This gives the comments section a social media look and feel and increases adoption and use of the system.
Setting Options for Displaying Comments
The next option, Enable time ago for Comment dates, changes how the date and time stamp of the comments is displayed.
Each comment entered is date and time stamped.
If this is checked, then the date and time of comments is displayed as time passed like 15 minutes ago, 1 hour ago,10 days ago.
If it is unchecked, then the date and time of comments are just displayed as the actual date and time of the post.
Auto-Create System Comments
The next option, Auto-create system comments, allows you to turn on functionality to capture a log of certain types of activities that take place on certain significant fields on certain items.
You can have the software generate system based activity comments on a project, task, issue or to-do or even custom items, if you turned on the option to Auto – create system comments for that item.
While Project Insight tracks all changes in the back end, only significant fields are displayed in the interface and those fields are listed next to the item.
For example, for projects, if the Type, State, Status, Company Default, Company Contract Default are changed then a system comment is generated to record that information.
In addition, for projects and tasks, you can select to monitor changes only if the project has a certain state. These are the next two options.
For example, you may only want to track changes on the project type field, if the project is in the planning or active state.
You may not care about changes on the type field for templates or archived projects.
For tasks, you may only want to generate system comments for changes to tasks for active projects.
These are the most common settings.
Click Save to save those changes.
Changing Security Settings
Password Strength and Timeout Settings
Next, you are going to see the Security options.
Click on Security in the System Configuration section.
The first two options have to do with enforcing HTTPS. If you require HTTPS/SSL on all connections and the login, check those two options.
The Login Session Timeout (minutes) enables the system to log off a user automatically if they have been inactive for this number of minutes. The default is two days but you can shorten that.
Then there are number of other additional security settings you can set here. They are pretty self-explanatory so you can read through them and set them as per your organizational security standards. Talk to your Information Systems staff if you need more direction on what to enter.
Enable Single Sign-on
You may use single sign-on (SSO) with the Project Insight software.
If you need help configuring your single sign on, we do offer professional services assistance. You may talk to your representative for more details.
With our help, you will receive some direction on how to set it up. But you must first enable SSO Auto-Registration. Check that option.
Down below is where you configure your single sign-on. SAML protocol
Click in the SSO Protocol drop down. You can choose the SAML 2.0 protocol or the WS-Federation protocol.
You must have your single sign on (SSO) server configured to work with cloud-based applications and your information systems staff will know what to enter in all these data fields based on that.
Google or Box Single Sign-On
You can also enable single sign on (SSO) using either Google Email Accounts or Box Email Accounts.
Click the arrow next to the System Configuration to collapse that section.
Set Up Time, Expense and Invoice Options
The next set of choices you are going to see are the Time & Expense and Invoice options.
Click the arrow next to the Time, Expense & Invoice options to expand that section.
Click on Time Settings.
This is where you determine how your team will enter time and approve time.
Configuring Time Entries
First, you will need to decide how and where time can be entered. The default is to enter time on a task. You set up a project and the tasks within that project and then your team enter the time they spend working on that task.
However, you can also configure Project Insight to allow time entries at the company level and/or time entries at the project level without a task.
On reason to allow for project level time entry is to allow resources to capture time entries for work that was not previously planned for. Allowing time entry at the company level lets resources account for time spent on administrative or operational work such as ‘email’ or ‘vacation’ or other types.
Allowing either of these will depend on your business process and what rules you are setting for what time is captured in Project Insight.
The Company Time Entries Billable Default On option enables you to set whether a time entry made at a company level is billable by default.
The next option, Company Time Entries Billable Toggle-able, identifies whether or not your team members can toggle the billable flag on or off when they are entering time.
If you are doing internally facing projects, where your clients are departments or organizations within your own organization, then you would not check these. If you are billing clients for work, then you would have to decide on the rules and turn these on as appropriate.
Setting Time Sheet Approvals Process
Time Sheet Approval Configuration
The rest of the entries have to do with how time sheet approvals work.
You may have a time approval workflow whereby time must be formally reviewed and approved or, if you do not do approvals you can skip that process.
Click on the Time Approvals drop down.
Click on the first option, which is None or Auto-Approved Time Sheets.
This option automatically sets a time sheet submitted by your team members to be approved automatically. No one has to go through an extra step to do that approval. This can work for smaller teams.
If you do want to incorporate a formal approval process, click on the Time Approvals drop down and select By Time Sheets.
That turns on the formal approval process.
Next you have to set what type of approval workflow you want.
Click in the Tiers drop down. You can have a 1 Tier approval or a 2 tier approval.
Select 1 Tier.
A one tier approval means that you have one level of approval for all the time entries.
To set who that one approver is, click in the Type drop down.
The approver can be the Project Manager on each the project. Set that by clicking on PM Approval Only.
Or you can have someone else be the approver such as the department manager or a resource manager.
Click in the Type drop down and select Approver Only to do that.
You will notice that when you select that, you now have additional options below that have to do with editing of time sheets.
You can set who is able to edit approved time sheets and these are used in conjunction with System Roles that are set up in the user profiles. Just read through each to determine whether or not you want to set those on.
The next option Enable Approver Selections, sets whether or not, the team member submitting the time can select who the approver should be.
Each user in the system can have a default time approver set. If you want them to be able to override who that default approver is, then check this option. Otherwise, it is set automatically to be their default time approver and they cannot change that.
You may also have a 2 tier approval process, where two levels of approvals must occur.
Click in the Tier drop down. Select 2 – Tier.
The 2 tier approval process is first, the project manager must approve time on the projects he/she is a project manager for, then a second level of approvals must occur.
The second level of approval works the same way. It uses the default time approver set for each individual user and optionally you can allow your team members to change that if required. The 2 tier approval sends the time to the project manager first, then the department or resource manager second, so it can take longer for time to be approved.
You also need to set your time sheet period, click on that drop down.
This specifies how often you want your team to submit their time sheets.
Weekly is the most common option that most organizations use, but semi-monthly is also used and you could also set monthly.
Monthly is not often used.
The next three options have to do with validating the data that is entered on time sheets.
If you have fairly rigid requirements for your team for entering their time, you can set the minimum number of hours on a time sheet.
For example, if your team works a 40 hour work week, you may always require them to enter a minimum of 40 hours by checking that option and typing that in.
You can also set a minimum and maximum number of hours that can be entered on any one day.
This helps to ensure that your team is not overloading any one day with all your hours for the week and helps to maintain integrity of the data entry.
You can also lock down time entries if you require. This is usually done if you are doing integration with a payroll system or invoicing system.
The rest of these options are not that commonly changed so you are not going to see them in detail in this session. If you want more information, you can watch the Track Your Time and Enter Your Expenses training session.
Now click Save.
Expense Settings
If you are capturing hard costs on tasks, projects or just need to track expenses from trips, you will want to set your expense settings.
In the Administration section, click on Expense Settings.
Most of these settings are similar to those you saw in the Time Settings section. They are the same settings, however, they are just applicable to expenses instead of time.
A couple of differences, though, for expenses, there is only one tier of approval.
That is the Expense Report Approvals.
If you want an expense approval process, check this on. If you just want all expenses that are submitted to be approved automatically without someone reviewing them, leave this option unchecked.
The approver for expenses can either by the Default Expense Report Approver set in the user profile or you can enable them to select the approver when they submit the expenses, which is the option Enable Approver Selections.
You are also able to create an expense report and save it without submitting it, but normally you submit it right away, so you can check on the option Automatically Submit Expense Report Checked to do that by default.
Also, for Expenses, the Report Period is commonly set to monthly, although, if you click in the drop down you can set it to weekly or semi-monthly as well.
Click Save.
Invoice Settings
The last option in here is Invoice Settings. Click on that.
If you are billing external clients for the work that you do and you want to manage the time entries and expense entries that make up the invoice line items, you will want to learn about invoices. You may take approved time and expenses and create an ‘invoice report.’ Once ont he report, you can aggregate individual line items and group them into higher level line items. Once an invoice is created it may be exported to Excel, QuickBooks or integrated with Quickbooks or other accounting or ERP system. To use this option, click on Enable Invoicing.
There are some other options here, such as time code required, expense code required and class required.
You can check those, if you always require that data on each invoice line item.
For more information about these settings, and the other options in this section of the Administration, you can attend the Set Up your Project Insight Settings training sessions and the Generating Invoices and ERP Integration training sessions.
Click the arrow next to the Time, Expense & Invoice section to collapse that.
Create Notification Defaults
Click on Notifications to go through the next set of options.
Most of the time, you will not need to change most of the options in this section, you will just leave the defaults.
Here you have the ability to set the email domain that your automatic notifications are coming from. If you are going to change these, you want to coordinate that with your email server administrator. The addresses that you enter here for auto-alerts, nightly reports and password reminders, must exist or the email will not work.
If the messages bounces, or there is bad email it is being sent to, those emails must go somewhere. If you leave the defaults, it goes into Project Insight standard email boxes that are purged on a regular basis.
You also have some other options such as having Project Insight try and set the email from and reply to email as the person who generated the alert instead of just the generic Auto-Alert email.
That, is the Auto-Alert Reply To and Auto-Alert From checkboxes.
The other Email Notifications Options which really pertain to your auto-alerts are covered in detail in some other training sessions, so you are not going to see these covered here.
Next are the RSS options. RSS notification options allow you to set up RSS URLS in other applications that will inform you of your notifications on your Project Insight dashboard and your work items on your dashboard.
Those are two separate data feeds that you can put on things like a portal page, a Facebook page and an Outlook RSS feed. RSS feed options are available in a lot of different applications.
These are not turned on by default, so if you want to use them, you need to turn them on.
Check on those options to enable that.
Now click on My Insight to go to your dashboard.
On the Notifications and the Work list section on the dashboard, there is an RSS feed icon.
Click on the RSS feed icon.
Click the NEW URL icon to get a URL for the feed.
Copy and paste that URL into data feeds wherever you need it.
You can also generate a new URL if you need one for security reasons or Disable the current one.
Use of those RSS feeds are covered in more detail in the Providing Team Member Updates training session.
Click X to close the form.
Set Project Options and Business Rules
Now you are going to see some project settings.
Click on Projects to go to the settings for Projects.
This sets business rules for the overall way projects work.
The first three options have to do with resource management settings.
Here, you can set the capacity percentage default for all your users. That is, how much of the users’ total hours as specified in their work schedule, will be used to do work that is managed in Project Insight.
If you are capturing time spent on all work in Project Insight, then this will be set to 100% because a 100% of each user’s time will be managed in Project Insight.
If your team only works on projects 50% of the time and you are only recording and managing project time in Project Insight and not any of the other 50% of their time, then the Capacity Percent Default would be 50%. Remember this is a default, so you can change it for each individual user if you require.
The next option, Utilization Percent Default, is the target or goal amount of the resources capacity that you want this resource utilized on projects. This is calculated by multiplying this percent by the total hours as specified in their work schedule
This is used for reporting purposes. You can see what the user’s target utilization is and then compare that to the amount they are actually scheduled to work.
The last option, Capacity Percentage Max, is where you set the maximum amount possible that this resource can be assigned to work on projects. The percent you enter here gets multiplied against the capacity amount determined from the % entered above, and then that value becomes the maximum capacity amount.
This is used if you also check the next option which is Enable Error on Over Allocation
This option turns on over allocation checking in Project Insight. That is, if you try to assign a resource to a task and by doing that you exceed that maximum capacity value, then an error message appears.
You can then optionally allow certain rules to override that error message.
The first option allows anyone with a resource management role on that project to override the error message and assign the resource to the task anyway.
The second option allows only project managers to override the message.
The third option allows only resource managers to override the message.
You can turn any all of these on or none of these on or any combination.
Although it may seem like a good idea to never allow a resource to be assigned to a task if they are already at maximum capacity for that time frame, in reality you will probably want to allow at least one of these override options. If you are turning on the enable error for over allocations for the first time, it is especially recommended that you allow some overrides until you work out all your processes and procedures.
Work Percent Complete Types
The next project option is the Work Percent Complete Types.
A very important function of Project Insight is to calculate earned value and to display automatic health indicators for each task so that you will know when a project is going off-track and you can fix it before it affects your schedule, budget, profitability or customer.
Your team members are responsible for updating the percentage complete on a task as they work on it. However, entering a number to represent a work percent complete can be very daunting for your team and may impede use and adoption of the system.
To make it easier for your non-analytical team members, you can set up user friendly terms instead to represent a percentage complete value.
To see an example of that, click on Work Percent Complete Types.
Here you can see the different work percent complete types that were set up. That is all covered in more detail in the Set Up Your Project Insight Settings training session, but before you can set them up, you must click on this option to turn on that feature.
Click Project Settings again.
Overriding Standard Permissions and Data Visibility
When you create users in Project Insight, you assign them system roles and also project roles.
Those roles define what those users can see and do by default.
However, there are options here, allow you to over-ride those settings.
Permissions
Each project manager and project scheduler has certain default permissions set up for that project.
However, you can override some of those standard settings with the permissions options.
These are not usually changed, so you will not see them in detail in this session, but read the online help and the descriptions if need more details.
Change Visibility Settings
You can also enable anyone, not just project managers to see the actual hours. That is the Enable Actual Hours Field for Anyone option.
The next four options take away visibility for certain data for project managers, such as the actual cost fields, the billable hours fields, the billable cost fields and the invoice and invoice fields.
Check those as appropriate for your organization. Again, these are not standard settings that are turned on. They are usually turned on for those organizations with some specific business process requirements.
Additional Budget Fields
Project Target Budget
The Project Target budget option turns on the ability to enter high level, top down project target budget values for hours, rates, labour value, expenses and an overall total.
If you bill clients for project work, you can also record target billable values.
Check that turn it on and use those values.
Estimated, Proposed and Total Hours
The Estimated Hours and Proposed Hours & Total are additional hours and dollar value columns that you can turn on for each task.
Turning on Proposed Hours & Totals is the most common option. This is used when you are managing fixed priced projects or are managing project budgets for professional services projects to capture additional budget data. You can attend those training sessions to get more detail on that.
Project Default State
When you add a project, by default, it gets set to the planning state, but instead, you can set it so that any new projects that get added get set to the active state by default.
Check the Project Default State option to do that.
Of course, your project creators can always change the default state before they save the project.
Turning on Prioritization of Projects
The next option, Project Priority Re-Ordered Automatically, if checked on, will allow you to enter a number for each project that indicates its priority. This is a simple number starting at 1.
If you enter a new number 1, the existing number 1 and all the subsequent projects will be automatically renumbered with 2 and so on.
Disable Project Baseline Delete
If you create baselines as part of your project management process, you can disable deletion of baselines, by checking on the Disable Project Baseline Delete option.
You would do this to ensure that no on deletes a baseline because you use it for reporting and management purposes.
Archiving Projects
When a project closes, you will want to archive it. The Automatically Move Archived Projects to a certain folder option, allows you to move projects from your active projects folder to an archived folder when you change the project from active to archived.
It is a recommended best practice to move your archived projects to a separate folder from your active projects. You do not have to do this, but it is a best practice to keep your active projects separate from closed or completed projects. This minimizes confusion.
Set up the folder and then click in the drop down to set it as the default.
If you want, you can also allow a user to select a different archive folder than the default.
Check the Allow User Selection of Archive Folder to allow that.
And if you want the permissions of the project to get reset after they get moved into the archive areas, then check the Automatically Reset Permissions on Archived Project.
Setting Automatic Health Indicators
One of the benefits of the Project Insight project and portfolio management software is that your team members provide updates on task status in real in real-time so that the software always knows what the earned versus the planned value is and what the actual hours versus the earned hours. This data is in turn used to determine automatically the project health and can flag you of any issues.
Managing and monitoring the health of your projects is also a very important project management responsibility. Using health indicators, you can monitor and control the health of your project schedule, the hours spent, the internal budget and the billable budget on your projects.
You need to set the options for that.
Click on Health.
You can set the thresholds for when the automatic project health indicators begin to display.
There are four measures:
A behind schedule indicator, which measures the earned hours against the planned hours.
An Over Accomplished Hours indicator which measure the actual or accomplished hours entered against the earned hours.
An Over Budget indicator which measures actual cost against the earned value cost.
And An Over Budget Billable indicator which measures the billable amount against the earned value billable.
You can set percentages or values for two different indicators, a yellow indicator and a red indicator.
Set those to what you need and this is a very powerful tool that you can use to ensure your projects stay on schedule and budget. The indicators will display on task lists, Gantt charts, project summaries, reports and dashboards.
To get more information on some of the other options in the Administration section you may want to attend the Secure Your Data with Permissions training session.