Projects
This page is visible to all users. Developers only see the projects to which they are assigned.
The project page is for managing projects including their tasks and actuals. It is also used to perform forward-scheduling and for assigning RSEs as resources to tasks within a project.
As a manager, this section of the page displays cards that correspond to projects you own. Any relevant information about the status of the project and its data is displayed in summary form on this card. You can use the buttons on the right of each card to quickly access a project's details, edit its meta data, visit its Scrum project or view its request document.
This section of the page displays a data grid of all the projects in the database should you wish to view information about any other project. By default, finished or cancelled projects are excluded but can be included by using the switch.
Clicking on the "Details" button on a card or the "Details" button at the end of a row of the data grid will take you through to the project details page.
Notes are only visible to managers or superusers when viewing the project details page. This is the official log of information associated with a project and is generally maintained by the project manager although any manager or superuser may add a note to any project. Only the author, editor or project manager owning the project may edit or delete a note once it is posted. Any manager may copy the link to the note. Notes that detail information on project finance can be tagged in the note editor view by enabling the Finance Info switch. This allows them to be easily found in the list of notes with the filter.
Notes may be flagged for follow-up by being given a due date in the note editor view. When an item has a due date, a Done button will appear on note itself which marks it as completed when clicked. Completed items can be re-open via the note editor view. Due items are highlighted on the cards in the My Projects section of the Projects page.
Notes can be filtered by the presence of the Finance Info tag or whether they have a due date. The search box allows you to search for any text string within any of the notes. The list will filter and highlight the matches automatically.
If you are the project manager for a project, you automatically follow the project and cannot unfollow it. For all other projects, managers can choose to follow this project. Following a project simply means that you are notified when a note is saved and you will receive an email detailing the content of the note.
There are three different monetary fields associated with a project.
The Budget is the amount of money the PI has available as agreed in the request document and on the demand card. The Planned Cost is how much the project is expected to cost based on the scheduled tasks and the day rates of the resources assigned to complete those tasks. The Actual Cost is the amount the project has cost the RSE department to date based on the number of hours actually booked by the resources on assigned to the tasks.
If a project that is already in the system gains an additional tranche of funding for a new phase and we have decided that it ought not to be treated as a separate project, we can extend the funding of an existing project by first updating the "Budget" field for the project with the new funding total and then adding a new Task in the task list to allow the scheduling of the extension.
The burn-up chart predicts how much effort is to be spent on the project based on the sum of the tasks within in. It uses a resolution of 1 week. The horizontal axis represents weeks. The vertical axis represents hours of effort (work). The blue line represents the cumulative effort planned for the project based on the demand of the tasks. The yellow line represents the predicted cumulative effort planned based on the actual resources assigned to the tasks. If the assigned resources are less than the demand for the task then this line will be below the blue line indicating that some of the planned work will not be done due to under-resourcing. Where the two dashed lines intersect it is possible to see how the amount of effort recorded for a project up to the current date compares to what is expected. If the intersection is below the yellow line then this constitutes an under-spend; too little effort has been spent on the project compared with what was planned. If the intersection is above the blue line, resources have recorded more effort on a project than was planned up to the present week.
The project details page will show a summary in both a Schedule Gantt as well as a data grid of the tasks that comprise a project. From the data grid, tasks can be edited, duplicated or split into two tasks at a particular date.
CapX offers two types of task Fixed Duration and Fixed Work. It also supports forward scheduling of both these task types. When adding or editing a new task, various options may be disabled based on the configuration you have selected. The information icons next to each heading will indicate why a certain field is disabled.
Clicking the "Update" button will schedule the task and update its information but will not save the changes to the database. "Update & Save" will perform and update and also write the changes to the database if the update is valid.
To take into account bank holidays, closure days and annual leave, CapX computes task duration based on 220 working days per year -- what you get when you deduct all these from the number of business days in a year (261). This means that staff are estimate by the scheduler to only work 0.84 FTE for every 1.0 FTE they are available. In other words, the annual leave and closure days are distributed evenly across the year to CapX. CapX only supports forward scheduling which means it needs to know the start date of a task, the work or duration desired and the resource demand in order for it to calculate an end date for the task.
If an RSE is assigned at 0.5 FTE, the duration of a task will be scheduled assuming that they only work 2.1 days per week with 0.4 days spent on leave or on a closure day. In practice, RSEs may book more hours per week to a task initially and the task will show as being ahead of schedule, but as soon as they take leave, this buffer will be eaten up and bring it back in line with the schedule. This is preferable than having to constantly adjust the schedule every time some takes a day off, or projects being shown as constantly behind.
Where we know how many days effort we want to allocate to a task, such as a burn-down type arrangement, we can make that task a "Fixed Work" task. When scheduling this type of task, CapX takes the percentage of the people assigned ("Units"), assumes 7 hours per day and 5 days per week (for 1 person at 1.0 FTE), corrected for annual leave etc. by reducing the "real" estimated effort to 0.84 FTE, and marches forward in time to compute the end date.
These types of tasks can be useful you want to precisely specify how long the task should last. If you assign a person at a particular FTE for that fixed period, CapX will then calculate how many hours effort (work) accumulate when that person works at the FTE given, for the number of days duration. It will automatically reduce the total effort based on the "real" estimate, i.e. by assuming that staff are only able to deliver 0.84 FTE of work for every 1.0 FTE assigned. This takes into account leave and closure days automatically. Duration in CapX is specified as the number of calendar days and hence includes weekends and bank holidays. The number of billable days is a corrected duration allowing for annual leave and closure.
Every project has its own default day rate. Individual resources can specify their own day rate which is useful if a mixture of rates apply to different resources on the same task e.g. junior and standard rate.
Task end dates are included in the assignable duration. So if you have a fixed duration task that starts on Monday 2nd January 2023 and runs for 7 days duration, the end date will show as Sunday 8th January 2023 (technically 6 days later) not 7 days later. An artefact of this is that the charts will not be able to display tasks that are 1 day in duration since the start and end date are the same and they are considered to have a zero value and hence no width on the chart.
When assigning an RSE to a task you must specify their assignment in FTE relative to a theoretical 1.0 FTE maximum. The tooltips on the Schedule Graph will show how much capacity they have spare out of the time they are available. If you want an RSE to work on a project "at 50%" i.e. 2.5 days per week then you will need to assign them to the task at 0.5 FTE.
Every task has a Demand property which represents the promised (or potentially minimum required) commitment in FTE for the task to be carried out. For example, if a customer has asked for 1.0 FTE of RSE time on a project and we choose to schedule this as two tasks in parallel, you may wish to divide the 1.0 FTE promised in to a promised 0.6 FTE and a promised 0.4 FTE on each task respectively. If we then assign an RSE to each at 0.4 FTE, the first task will be flag by the system as being under resourced and an unmet demand value for that task will be stored as 0.2 FTE.
Sometimes projects may be delayed due to RSEs taking a concentrated period of leave, staff sickness or strike action etc. It may just need more work than budgeted in order to deliver a viable MVP. To provide a "no-cost extension" to a project, to add a new fixed-duration task with a name like "NCE" or "Overrun" to the project and book any further time to this project. A record of the original budget will still be present in the project information but planned work will increase to reflect the increased cost for the RSE department. If the original project is fixed work, and work has been completed more slowly than expected, then actuals may still be booked to the original planned task(s) up to the maximum amount of work scheduled for the task will all extra actual work logged against the extension task. The total amount of actual work will then be accurately recorded as part of the project summary at the top of the page.