Product
From TUTOS
Contents |
Introduction
The TUTOS system has a lot of functionality dealing with products and projects. Well, to make one thing clear from the start, both 'product' and 'project' refer to the same thing. During this chapter we will refer to this thing as a project since that is what TUTOS is most used for, but if your business requires you to do otherwise, simply replace 'project' with 'product' and you'll be fine.
There are many things you can do with projects. Below is a small list of possibilities:
- Make a relation between a customer and a project.
- Enter the time spent on a project.
- Define subtasks of a project.
- Make an invoice related to this project.
- Define an installation of the results of a project (or a product).
- Allocate human resources to a project.
- Make some nice graphs about the current state of the project.
As you can see, there is a lot to talk about. So without further ado lets start!
List
The first thing we will do is show you how to get a list of available projects in the system to start playing around with. To display a list of available projects click on the "Products & Projects" link in the menu on the left. Next you will see a search screen to narrow the results of the search for available projects.
In this screen you can enter part or all of the project's name. The system will search for project names that contain the part you enter. You can also do an extended search where you can specify more criteria than just part of the name.
If you simply click on "Search" a list of all available projects will be shown.
As you can see, there are not a lot of projects stored in the system, one project called "TUTOS" version "20020327" and two projects called "Linux", one for version 2.2 and one for version 2.4. On the left side of the screen, in the upper part of the menu, you can check all the fields that you would like shown in this list. For our exercise click on the name 'Tutos' and this gives the screen as shown in the next picture.
There are a lot of things to take note of, so we will stop here while I explain the different available options. A lot of things will be explained later, so we will be done sooner then you think.
The upper left part of the menu contains a number of options but only the first three are relevant to this section. The "Search" option is used to start a new search for a project, the "New" option is obviously for entering a new project, and the "Printable" options presents a screen similar to this one but without the menu to make this page look better when printed.
The detail screen itself contains a lot of information. I'll explain some of it here.
- Created by: This link takes you to a screen with details about the person who created this project (in this case its Gero). The date and time link takes you to that specific date on the calendar.
- Product/Project: This is the name of the project.
- Version: Every project can have a version number attached to it. Projects with the same name and a different version number are not automatically related. Later I will discribe how to relate projects.
- State Acquisition: Every project can be in one of several states. The standard states are:
- "Acquisition": The project has been acquired but work has not yet started.
- "Ongoing": Work is under way on the project.
- "Finished": The project is finished.
- "Cancelled": The project is cancelled.
- "Quote ongoing": The project is being quoted to the customer.
- "Quote Cancelled": The customer was not interested in the bid/quote.
- Probability: To make a reliable sales forecast report one must estimate the chance this project will be sold.
- Manager: Every project has a project manager. It is possible to change the manager later but one manager is mandatory.
- Partner: A partner role has been reserved for the company "Linux Consulting". There are several roles possible within a project and they are not restricted to people roles either! The standard roles are:
- Manager: Mandatory project manager
- Commercial Manager: Commercial manager involved in this project.
- 2. Manager: A second manager (backup or otherwise)
- Sales: Contact person from the sales department.
- Development: Contact person from the development department.
- Customer: Link to a customer.
- Supplier: Suppliers.
- Reseller: Resellers.
- Partner: Partners like subcontractors.
- Description: The project description.
- Classification 1: First classification.
- Classification 2: Second classification. The entries in these classes come from a language file and can be easely adjusted to fit your company's needs.
- Price: 0.00 Cost: 0.00: Both project price and cost can be entered.
- est. start: ------ est. end: ------: Enter the estimated start and end date for this project.
- Bugs: This will present an overview of bugreports related to this project (more about bug reports in a separate section). As you can see, the current state is 'OPEN' and there has been 0.00 hours spent on solving this particular bug.
- Links: Links related to this project are displayed here.
- Appointments: 24/6/2002 invitation to the ball. Visit from: Gero Kohnert 22/6/2002 Meeting Visit at: Linus B Torvalds: Both entries show appointments related to this project. When you make a new appointment and you enter a unique part of the projects name in the 'project' field this link will be established.
- Notes: A note related to this project (more on notes in a separate section).
- Tasks: Tasks related to this project. Clicking on "Tasks Overview" brings up a new screen showing all related tasks.
- Demo Task 1: A customizable maximum number of tasks will be shown here.
- Demo Task 2: see last note.
- Effort: How much total time has been spent on this project.
- Click the "see history" link to see the history of changes related to this project.
As you can see, there is a lot of information available about projects. It is understandable if you feel just a little overwhelmed, so let's continue by simply creating a new project in the TUTOS system.
Create
Making a new project is actually quiet simple. We'll start by clicking on the "Products & Projects" link in the menu on the left. This will bring us to the project search screen but also shows an option in the upper left part of the menu called 'New'. When we click 'New', we'll be presented with a screen very similar to the one you see in the next picture.
Personally I think that with the information I already supplied, filling out this form can't be too difficult. There is one thing you should be aware off, linking a project to a customer or a partner or something else involves entering all the form data, clicking the 'Enter' button and after that clicking the 'modify' menu option to enter the second role related to this project. Ah, wait, let me show you. We start by entering some data as shown in the next picture:
There is something on this form that we have not yet discussed which is the 'new relation' field. This is used to define a relation between this project and another. You simply enter the name of the other project and the type of relation you want. You can choose from the following list:
- Project Base: make a link to a base project of which this is a subproject.
- Ancestor Project: make a link to an ancester project.
- Succesor Project: make a link to a successor project.
- Sub Project: make a link to a subproject.
As you can see, this all looks very easy. Now we click on the 'Enter' button to submit and store our data. Next we see a screen with the project details we entered. Since we are still not completely satisfied we will continue with the next section about modifying this project.
Modify
In our menu there now is a new option called 'Modify'. Obviously since you created the project you should have the rights to change it as you see fit. Since the project we saw earlier ('TUTOS') wasn't created by us we weren't allowed to change it. Anyway, the screen displayed should look similar to the one in the next picture.
Since we would like to define an extra relation in this project we click in the 'modify' link in the menu on the left. This takes us a screen similar to the one we saw earlier.
As you can see there is now a second role entry field called "New Role". Since we would like to partner with the Linux Consulting company that is what we enter before clicking on the 'Enter' button again.
All the data is there now and it's all very 'clickable'. One thing we now need to learn is how to undo all our hard work. The next section explains how to delete a project.
Delete
It probably is never a good idea to delete a project. For one thing, all associated data will also be erased like tasks, invoices, time recorded working on the project, etc. But since you are allowed to make a project you should also have the option to delete it. Deleting a project is the same as with other TUTOS entities. Just click on the 'Delete' link in the upper left part of the menu. A confirmation message box will pop up asking you if this is what you really want to do (see next picture). Just click on "OK" and you're it's deleted.
