Creating projects

On the basis of a project plan that specifies the phases of the project and their temporal con­ditions, you can now start to create the project and its phases.

•      Select  File    New    Project  in the top menu of the folder where you want to create the project.

•      The action form ‘Add Project’ has three sections. In section ‘General’ you enter name, de­scription as well as start date and completion date. You may also enter tags char­ac­terizing the project. Apart from the name, all specifications are optional. If you don’t enter temporal conditions, however, you receive no support of work progress control.

•      In section ‘Phases’ you click on [Add phase] in order to create a project phase, again with name, tags, description, start date and completion date. All specifications apart from the name are optional, but the absence of temporal conditions also means that work progress cannot be monitored.

You may add further project phases by clicking [Add phase] again. Also after creation of the pro­ject you may still add, change and delete phases.

•      In section ‘Attributes’ you may enter a category and a priority for the project. You may also define your own attributes here. Tags, user-defined attributes and other meta­data may be used when searching for the project in BSCW.

•      Hit [OK] to create the project.

After you have created the project and its phases, you may now add the project team. You invite all persons who are involved in the project in the role of Member using  File    Access    Invite Member  in the top menu of the project. Thereafter all members of the project team may access project documents and may create, carry out and coordinate tasks. You cannot invite further members to the phases of a project, i.e. the members of the project phases are exactly the members of the project.

As an example, the following figure shows the development project “Substitution of the com­mis­sion settle­ment system” for an insurance company. The project is divided into seven pha­ses. Some of the project phases follow one another strictly in time, some overlap.

Figure 28: Project with seven phases

In order to have phase and project properties also shown in folder listings, select  View    Cus­tomize  in the top menu and choose the columns ‘Start’, ‘Due’ and ‘Progress’ for display. The due date of a phase or project corresponds to the completion date planned.