Project Management System Help

Intelligence−Soft Project Management System

Index | Glossary

Projects

Project is the fundamental system-level entity of Intelligence-Soft Project Management System. Project is a sequence of related activities having its own goal and the lifecycle beginning from preliminary negotiations between involved companies and ending with the delivery of results and customer’s approval of the deliveries. Examples of Project goals: development of new software product, modification of existing software product, web-site development, etc.

From administrative point of view Project usually assumes an existence of the agreement between participants, however in some cases there are no direct correspondence between Projects and agreements. For example, one Project may be covered by two or more agreements specifying separate parts of the work. Another situation takes place when client company and contractor company have long-term cooperation agreement covering many Projects.

From the Project Management System system's point of view Project is an object, which has its own properties listed below and a container for most of other objects – Tasks , Bug Reports, Milestones, Forums, etc.

Each Project has following properties:

Name – string limited to 50 chars representing Project’s name.
Description – string (usually multiline) describing Project’s scope and other general project information.
Status – one of the following: Draft, In progress or Completed. Draft stage covers all preliminary negotiations, communication and documents, which took place before the Project agreement was signed. In progress status denotes Project development in itself. And finally, Completed status means that the Project has been completed.
Client company – reference to one of the Companies denoting who ordered the Project. Actually several Companies may participate in a Project, for example, one client company and several development teams or one client company, one intermediary and one development company, etc. However Client company must be accentuated in order to be handled by the system in a special way. See the description of Team Members to understand how other companies participating in a Project may be referenced.
Created – date when Project was created (entered into Project Management System).
End date – date when Project status was changed to Closed.
Estimated hours – estimated amount of work in man-hours for entire Project (if applicable).
Hourly rate – for a Projects using simple Time & Material pricing model (where every task has the same hourly rate without reference to the complexity of the task or qualification of developers involved) system use the value of Hourly rate property for financial calculations. For Fixed price or more complex pricing models this property may be left blank.

To create new Project or alter existing Project’s properties user must have Administrator’s rights.