Overview
In this training on projects, we will review viewing project plans, viewing tasks assigned, and updating tasks in a project plan.
Transcript
There are a couple more things that I wanna show you, and one of the most important parts of your project is the plans section. So when you have a project plan, it is basically the heart of the project. It indicates all the different action items that need to happen on a project. I've actually, you know, created a template for this, so I'm gonna insert that instead of actually creating it from scratch. But once we've created a project plan from a template, we can still go in and modify. Please notify your TeamDynamix system administrator to assist you with creating templates in case you are not familiar on how to do that process. All I have to do is select +New. I am gonna call this the TDX Application Implementation Waterfall Plan. Do not need a description. It is a type of a waterfall. A waterfall is more of your traditional project management plan. It's got all the details, the detailed work breakdown structure, also known as a WBS with all of your details highlighted. You can also create a card wall plan, which is more of a, you know, agile approach to managing projects via what we call cards. Or some of you might know them as Kanban boards. Let's go ahead though, do the traditional approach 'cause it does give you a lot more features. Do we have a TeamDynamix project template? Yes, we do. All right, we don't wanna create everything from scratch each time. Select Save, done. I'm gonna have to pick the application implementation template I've created. There we go. Select Create. Almost there with my 14 template tasks. Close this out. Done. Here we go. Now that we've created our first project plan called the waterfall plan, let's go ahead and explore it. Select the waterfall plan. The plan manager will open up and you'll now need to edit the plan by checking it out over here in the upper right-hand side to make changes to it. You can certainly do some changes by simply utilizing the locked in menu, right? But ultimately, in order to make changes to the plan, it's easiest to check it out. Maybe you wanna call it something else, you know? So when you're initiating a project, maybe you wanna call it Projects Charter Signed. You know, in the planning stages, do you define your project plan? That needs to be done. Schedule kickoff meeting with your stakeholders. Hold the kickoff meeting, right? That's usually a big milestone, so let's mark it as such. So I'll kickoff meeting. We'll mark it as a milestone by using this diamond button here, and it'll add this little diamond icon here. Why does it help? Well, if you mark or flag something as a milestone, it's that one day event that will highlight something significant on your project. Typically, you know, within a project or within different sprints, you're trying to always get to that milestone to completing a particular section of your project. We also divided this project plan into the PMO process groups, initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing. So you'll notice it's got several action items that are referring, or as we know them as tasks, that are referring to that process group. You don't have to create a project plan as a process group, but I think this is a good way to get started, especially if you're pretty new to project management and you're not sure how to create project plans yet. There's also, of course, tons of resources out there with project management type templates or project plan templates specific for application implementation. This is something set standard or similar that I would personally use. For instance, you know, you can certainly change the dates at any point in time. Maybe it needs to be a little bit longer, right? We can certainly change the dates out and it will adjust my plan accordingly. And all the subsequent dates, as you've noticed, why did it change my subsequent dates? Because I've created a dependency via what we call the predecessors. The predecessors are basically tasks that need to be completed for the next task to start. You know, there's a variety of ways to manage it. You can start tasks in parallel, start to start, or start to finish. But in general, let's look at this very high level, very simple. So for instance, for the defined project plan to start, I need to have my project charter signed first. Where do I know how I got this number two here? The number two, the defining a project or starting that task is actually the number over here, the row number, right? And it'll go on. So in order to schedule a kickoff meeting I must have made sure that my project plan has been completed, so on and so forth. I've created basically a variety of dependencies here on a previous task, getting this to a specific, or creating basically then ultimately a Gantt chart. And not only that, but creating dependencies allows you to see the true closeout date. So hopefully I'll be done by May, or sorry, by August 24 in the year of 2022, right? This is a one day duration task. I can add different priorities to these tasks. You know, I can certainly highlight that here. I'll change the color of the button. I can add some estimated hours, actual hours. I can start working on these tasks. But ultimately, after I create the plan with all of its tasks and all of its dependencies I get to start to assign these tasks. Very important. If you don't assign tasks to anybody your project basically will sit there and nothing will happen. It's very easy to assign a task by double clicking into the field right next to the action item. Let's say we're gonna assign Serkan this task, and we're gonna assign Serkan and several other team members these tasks by simply checking their names. Or what I usually do is I like to have a copy and paste, Control C, highlight that, in that way, you know, it's a little bit easier and faster to actually get all of these users in. Now, maybe all of our team members are responsible for the execution state. You can copy and paste here. And then what I really like is if you wanna be a little bit more agile, you can click on the Resources button here on the right-hand side. Scroll down just a little bit, and say, while Serkan is responsible for a lot of these closure activities I can drag and drop Serkan's name or anybody's name here and basically assign them to tasks. Another way to manage that and basically do the same. So as you can see, I've assigned a bunch of tasks here to my users. I can now say, well, Serkan already started working on signing the project charter, so this part is maybe 90% done, right? I might already have gone ahead and started working on the project plan. So 10% done, scheduling's maybe 5%. We're not quite there yet. And then we haven't started the kickoff meeting. So it's very, very easy to go to the project or to each task at this very, very high level and mark each task as complete. Once you're finished, do a select check in. Done. Right? But let's say I could actually go in here and right mouse click on define the project plan, and select Update, instead, and say, I am down about 80%, right? And I'm not gonna notify anybody of this update, but I could say, technically, you know, I should notify Serkan and several other team members that I've worked on this task. Select Save, done. The project will be updated here as well. You'll notice as a functional user of TeamDynamix, there's many ways to do basically the same action. Some people prefer to check it out. That's my preferred method. If you only have one task, you don't necessarily need to check out the project plan, especially if you're just, all right, you're not even responsible for all of these tasks. So there's many ways to manage it. What else I would like to show you here though is looking at this Gantt chart function, or chart function in general. So the nice thing is as you're creating dependencies between tasks, these predecessor tasks, TDX will create this little visual for you of a Gantt chart. Those of you who are more advanced project management users, notice that each chart or each action item or task is listed here in a nice Gantt format. It's basically like a duration or a lengthy bar that shows you how long this task will take. It'll also show you the dependencies between each task, and ultimately from a timeline perspective telling you when it will go live, right? It's kind of very nice to see it in that visual format. Now, please note that visual format will only come up for you if you created predecessors like this one here. And you can always collapse that or make it go away by selecting the Gantt button one more time and it's gone. You can always create different views, resource allocation views on a project plan, who's been associated to what? You can see, I think Serkan is here, letter S, assigned to quite a bit of tasks here. But, you know, again, feel free to explore these different views. You can configure your columns. If you don't wanna see the estimated or actual dates you can hide those. You can manage custom columns by calling field one another text field. Maybe Go-Live Date or something like that. You know, there's many ways you can leverage some of these different features. So again, you know, some of these can be changed, can be removed, can be updated. There we go. Our project plan looks a lot smaller compared to the defaults that were in there before. You can always export your plans out to an Excel to a TD plan or to an MS Projects XML. Let's say you're starting with this particular plan and you've developed a really, really great template or a project plan that you can think, "Oh wait, I can make this actually to a plan template." Export this view out, and then, you know, again, if you have not done this before, work with your TeamDynamix administrator to create templates that you can use then for other projects down the road versus having to upload it directly from your computer. This is what we have here on waterfall plans. Let's take a look at another form of a project plan, and that is the plan of a card wall. Let's go ahead and create a card wall sample template by selecting +New, give it a title. TDX Application Implementation Card Wall Plan. So card wall plan is more for agile projects, right? You think about you've got a card or a board that has a bunch of cards or sticky notes on a whiteboard of some sort, and you're shoveling these items from left to right, completing your items. This is basically what a card wall is. It's a nice listing or it looks very similar to a swim lane plan. And I'm gonna go ahead, and I don't think I've got a big template here. Yeah, I figured. Oh, but let's use the IT template here. Default, close it, and now we've got the card wall plan here. All you have to do is open up the card wall plan, and here it is. Here are all of your lists, right? New list, in process, completed, on hold.