Projectmanagement

From SwissExperiment

Contents 1 Project management tools 2 Existing Projects 3 Implementation 3.1 Templates 3.2 Properties 4 Using the tools 4.1 Keeping an eye on your tasks 4.2 Who else is working on Category 'x'?

Project management tools

The wiki includes a basic tool for project management. This is not designed to replace a professional budgeting and resource tool but is instead designed to let you and your colleagues see what is going on in a collaborative project.

The tool works by defining and tracking projects and tasks:

• Tasks are small units of work or definite 'milestones', such as:
  • 'Prepare annual report'
  • 'Field trip'
  • 'Deadline for proposal submission'
• Projects are collections of tasks, such as:
  • 'SwissEx Science'
  • 'Disdrometer'

Tasks can also be linked to particular locations or fieldsites; this allows you to keep track of what's going to happen at a particular place.

Existing Projects

The following list shows projects that have been defined so far:

Project	Page	Info	Owner
Project Management Tool	PMproject7b96a13	Creating and developing a simple project management tool	Andy.clifton
SLF Wind Tunnel	PMproject9f41da4	Wind Tunnel Planning Tool	Katie.leonard Christoph.gromke
Wannengrat	PMprojectb8b20e9	Fieldsite management of SLF's Wannengrat fieldsite	Ndawes
SwissEx Science	PMprojectb979c7f	The SwissEx Science workplan and task monitoring	Rebecca.mott Megan.daniels Lehning
SwissEx	PMprojectde1eb4a	Workplan of the SwissEx project	Ndawes
Wiki Development	PMprojectf7b922d	General Wiki development tasks	Ndawes Ipaparrizos Hoyoung_Jeung

• Click here to add a project.

Implementation

So far we've implemented basic project management tools such as:

• timelines
• task lists, including:
  • active
  • overdue
  • completed
  • tenative
• milestone lists

The whole system is built using the semantic wiki. This means that projects and tasks are defined with metadata, keeping the page content fairly simple. It also means that (like all metadata) the content can be queried.

Templates

Most of the tools and data displays are built around templates. There is a list of these templates and other useful pages in the Project Management Tool category.

To see what data the templates require and what they can do, open the template page and read the instructions given there. Please do not edit the templates themselves!

Properties

A group of properties defines a project or task. To keep the project management metadata separate from the station and deployment metadata, the properties of the projects and tasks are prefaced 'PM'. For example:

• PMprojectname for the project name
• PMtaskname for the task name
• PMprojectID is a unique identifier for each project
• PMtaskowner is the person responsible for a task

To see what values already exist for one of these properties, have a look at the PMprojectname or PMcategory property.

Using the tools

To use the project management tools, follow this procedure:

1. Check for a pre-existing project management page in your namespace. Pages currently active include Projectmanagement and Science:Projectmanagement. There's no reason for this specific page name, but a standard page lets users find it easily.
2. If a page exists already, either add your tasks to an existing project or start a new project.
3. If a project management page does not exist in your namespace, create a page and add this to it:

{{PMtaskoverview}}

This is a call to the PMtaskoverview template, which looks for all projects in a namespace (or all projects if called from the main namespace).

1. Follow the links on the page to look at projects or add new projects.
2. Add tasks as required.

Keeping an eye on your tasks

You can display a list of tasks and projects for a user with the PMusertasks template, e.g.

{{PMusertasks|Taskowner=Andy.clifton}}

To find out what projects you are managing or what tasks you've been assigned, try this:

1. Go to your userpage Special:MyPage; the link to your homepage is at the top of the page, where you can see your name.
2. Either:
   1. Switch to the new user template by going to Form:User_Profile_Template_v2
   2. Or, if you have a customised homepage, add this line to the page content:

{{PMusertasks|Taskowner={{PAGENAME}}}}

Who else is working on Category 'x'?

If you want to know what tasks have been defined in another project, use the template PMtasksbycategory. e.g.

{{PMtasksbycategory|Taskcategory=IT_Administration}}