Project Management and Reporting

One of the features I was impressed with when it first became available is the way you can create and document a process within Package Studio. When you have a team of multiple administrators (particularly when you add someone to the team) it is very valuable to have a documented process- “this is the way WE do things”. The sample project has some good details and adding to the list, tools and inline documentation is pretty straight-forward. Since the introduction of this feature, this too has been significantly enhanced.

Aside from simply checking off a box as you complete each step in the process for a given package, you may also configure the project template to automatically update the project status as you go. Answering questions like “when is my package going to be ready?” becomes much easier when you take advantage of the additional project management data you can maintain. Information you may update includes:

• Estimated Completion Date – Manually specified date on which you expect the project to be completed.
• Current Target Date - As work on the package moves along, if you determine that the project will be completed before or after the estimated completion date, this space is provided to specify an updated target date.
• Actual Completion Date – This field is filled in automatically when the project’s status is set to Completed.
• Estimated Hours – Manually entered number of hours you estimate the project will take to complete.
• Hours Completed – You determine if hours are entered by project or by task. If project, you enter the total number of hours for the project, updating the entry as work on the project progresses. If Task is marked, you enter the actual hours for individual tasks and the total of the task hours is entered automatically.
• Remaining Hours – Initially left blank, when work on the project has begun, use this field to record the actual amount of hours remaining to be done. For example, suppose you originally estimated the project to take 40 hours, and 20 hours have been completed. However, because you know the remaining tasks will take 30 hours to complete, you enter 30 hours here. This provides a more realistic number in the % Completed field:
• % Completed – The percent completed is calculated as follows:
  • If Remaining Hours is blank:
    • % Completed = Hours Completed / Estimated Hours
  • If Remaining Hours has a value:
    • % Completed = Hours Completed / (Hours Completed + Remaining Hours).

A Metrics tab gives you a nice summary of the package and its progress, highlighting the numbers described above. Additionally, if you are using the IIS front end tool for sharing this information via your intranet (Application Gateway), setting a project status to Closed or On Hold in the Project Management tab assigns the same status to the corresponding request in Application Gateway.

Making all this data even more valuable is a highly configurable reports feature that lets you completely control the reports menu in the Workbench application. There are several included reports and you may create your own as .rpt formatted files (Crystal Reports).

Reports may be exported as PDF, html, and any number of spreadsheet and database formats.

Finally, there is a new Management Reports Web application designed to give project leaders, managers, and other non-packaging personnel access to Workbench reports without running Wise Package Studio. This Web application replaces the reports that formerly were available on the Reports tab of Application Gateway.

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