Getting Started with Project Management Configuration

Introduction to Project Management Configuration

Project Management enables organizations to streamline and standardize the management of project activities using a template-based, collaborative approach.

The Project Details tab of the Project Overview page contains fields delivered with the Best Practices installation (see Installation and Administration Guide for more information). These fields do not need to be set up or altered in any way before you start using Project Management, but if you want to change them, they can be customized to suit your business needs in the following ways:

  • Individual field names and values can be changed. These fields and their workflow interactions are contained and defined by a request type that can be altered in the PPM Workbench. See Configuring Project Details Tab Fields, for more detailed information.

  • Fields themselves can be configured to be hidden, visible, or read-only depending on what stage has been reached in the project process.

The project process, which is driven by the workflow discussed in Configuring the Project Process, can also be changed; for example, security on each workflow step can be configured to suit your business needs. Also see this section for details on configuring the underlying project process.

Project Management includes specialized project control items that can be submitted and resolved during project execution as Demand Management requests:

  • Issues can be filed against a particular project to raise issues that require attention.

  • Risks can be brought up to highlight risks that may endanger project execution.

  • Scope changes can be requested to adjust the scope of the project.

Once submitted, these requests follow their own workflows to resolution. Each request type and its workflow are delivered with the Best Practices installation, ready for you to use. But, if you want to change them, they can be customized to match your project control processes. (For more information about Best Practices installation, see Installation and Administration Guide.) The following project control request aspects can be changed to suit your business needs:

  • Individual fields and possible values can be changed.

  • Fields themselves can be configured to be hidden, visible, or read-only depending on what stage has been reached in the workflow.

  • The workflows can be changed, including workflow structure and security settings for each step.

For detailed discussion of these project control request types and workflow configuration, see Configuring Project Control Processes.

Work plans organize the specific tasks or deliverables for a project into a hierarchical structure. Project Management provides scalability for viewing work plans of different sizes by providing a mechanism for controlling the number of tasks displayed at any given time. In this way, larger work plans are divided into pages that display sets of tasks. Users can choose from a set of options in their profiles how large they want a work plan page to be. Key Server Parameters and Scheduled Services, explains how to configure the available options, as well as settings related to:

  • Cost calculation roll-up

  • Microsoft® Project integration

Project Management also includes task user data, custom fields that can be associated with every task on a work plan. If you have no need of custom fields for tasks on your work plans, then you do not need to configure task user data. Configure task user data, explains task user data configuration.

Specific features of Project Management relating to work plan page size, cost calculation roll-up, or Microsoft Project integration can be configured by modifying the server.conf file on the PPM Server. Key Server Parameters and Scheduled Services, contains details on these features and their controls.