Creating Projects

The Process Dashboard provides powerful support for planning, tracking, and managing a set of work. To take advantage of these features, the first step is to create a project.

Dashboard projects can support team work or individual work. These two project types are described below.

Team Projects

If you will be collaborating with other people on the work, you should work with your team leader to create a team project. A team project allows your team to share a common work breakdown structure, to support each other on shared tasks, and to see project-level reports that roll up data from everyone on the team.

Team Projects are created within a Team Dashboard, which coordinates the flow of shared data. Then, you and your team members join the project from your personal dashboard.

See the Team Use section of the Users Manual for extensive help on the use of team projects to plan, track, and manage team work.

Personal Projects

For independent work (or for times when your team members are not using the Process Dashboard), you can create a personal project. A personal project:

• Gives you tools to quickly and easily create a detailed personal task plan
• Helps you predict when the work might finish, so you can manage your commitments to others
• Provides charts and reports for tracking your progress and improving your process

You can also use a personal project to capture data about a collection of miscellaneous tasks, even if you don't need to track your progress against a schedule. The Work Breakdown Structure Editor makes it easy to enter the list of tasks. Then you can use the dashboard toolbar to log time, mark tasks complete, etc.

To create a personal project, just choose "New Project" from the configuration menu. Then take a look at the instructions for working with personal projects.

Comparing Project Types

Team projects and personal projects are more alike than they are different. Essentially, a personal project provides all of the same powerful planning and tracking tools that teams find useful, streamlined for a project that has only one team member. The table below offers a comparison: