Project Info Tab

Name

The name of this project. When creating a new project, it will default to the same name as that provided on the Engagement Info tab. You may change the project name by typing in the field. Maximum of 255 characters.

Code

This field may or may not be editable depending on your installation settings. It typically auto populates using a numbering scheme of your choosing. See Auto Numbering of Clients, Engagements, and Projects for more information.

Stage

Stages govern both permissions and user interactions with a project. Use the dropdown to move the project between stages. For a full explanation of each stage and how stages can optimize your project workflow, please see the Stage Editor.

 Stages control:

• Project settings - such as the ability to submit time and expenses

• User permissions - such as the ability to schedule resources

• Workflow processes - such as the ability to move projects between stages

• Additional settings - as discussed in the stage editor

To actually move a project to a new stage requires any one of several permissions.

Contract Line Item

This field can only be set on initial project creation. It is a required field. Your options on this dropdown are determined by the Contract Line Items defined on the Engagement Contract Tab. Contract Line Items are essentially a business rule of a contract. For example, this part of the contract is for five thousand dollars of labor. This project is responsible for delivering that part of the contract. Multiple projects can contribute to a single Contract Line Item.

% Likelihood

Percent likelihood allows you to factor the likelihood of winning a contract into your analytical reports. Thus allowing you to accurately forecast metrics like revenue projections. On just a single project this may not seem very useful, but on a large number of projects the aggregate effect is useful. For example i you had $1MM of projected sales you can cross-reference this against your sales funnel as it narrows from 25%, to 50% to 75% likelihood. This helps you to accurately predict your future revenue and staffing requirements. Projector also uses the Percent Likelihood information in Project Dashboard KPIs.

Please see the next section in this table, Base on Stage, for more information regarding this feature.

Base on Stage

Tick this checkbox to have the percent likelihood automatically determined by the project's stage. As the stage changes the likelihood automatically updates. A typical scenario may be a 50% chance in the sales phase that becomes 100% once it is in the delivery stage. You may want to untick this box and specify the percent likelihood manually. Often a project manager is intimately familiar with the project and accurately understands its true likelihood - upping the percentage of a project you are confident you will win or dialing back the likelihood on a project that you know is a long shot.

Location

The location associated with this project. Locations are used for projects, resources, time, and expense entry.

Manager

Project managers control a number of aspects of a project. Through a combination of stage permissions and installation settings PMs can request or schedule people to work on the project, create project plans, invoice for projects, set billing rates, and create budgets. How much or little a PM can do depends on your organization and its business needs.

When you expand the Manager drop-down list, the following items are displayed:

• Users with the general permission Include in Project Manager List whose resource is in the engagement cost center or a child of that cost center

• Current engagement manager

• Current project manager

If you don't see the person you want click <<lookup>> and you can specify any user you want.

Begin Date and End Date

The project start date is required. The project end date can be left blank(no end date) to accommodate ongoing projects. These dates control four aspects of a project:

If you are editing an existing project and cannot move the project start date forward, then one of the four items above has caused a conflict. You will need to resolve the conflict, for instance by moving role start dates forward first.

When you set a project to a closed stage, we will automatically populate the end date with either today's date or the earliest possible date given the constraints discussed above.

Hours/Day

By default this field's value is inherited from the project's location. It serves two primary functions.

First, it is used for detailed task management planning to figure out how many days something will take to complete. DTM scheduling is done in hours. So (Hours per Day) / Hours = Days of Work. For example, (20 hours of work) / (8 hours per day) = 2.5 days of work.

Second, this setting is used for daily billing calculations. Daily billing rounds time up to equal a whole day. For example, if I work 5 hours today, then it gets rounded up to 8 hours of billable labor.

Description

Provide a brief description of the mission for this project. This description is visible in time and expense entry when your resources enter their data. Descriptions may be up to 1000 characters long.

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