All people in your organization use Team@Work every day. Every day Team@Work server handles thousands of task modifications, hundreds of projects shifting from one state to another. How managers can overview all these changes? How they can keep informed what is going on? By using the Team@Work Reports. This application supports managers with the two most important dynamic characteristics of the running processes: the status of projects and the workload of every part of the organization. There are two report groups: project reports and organization reports.
The first step is logging as usual. To use Team@Work Reports however, you need managers rights (see Team@Work Designer).
Active projects are displayed on the left panel. They are grouped by workflow. Each workflow is displayed as a folder (or tree node) which contains active projects ruled by it.
You can perform several operations over the workflow/project tree.
Click on the small icon to the left of the workflow folder to expand or collapse its content.
Click on the "projects" title of the panel to sort the content. Consequent clicks switches the sorting order between ascending, descending and "original" (the order received from the Team@Work server).
There is a toolbar above the Workflow/Project tree.
It consists of two parts. First two buttons relate to the workflow/project tree itself. The next buttons generate different reports.
Every time
when somebody in the organization finishes a task, every time when a
new project is started, the content of the reports is changed. You
can update the view by clicking the "Refresh" button
.
This command retrieves the actual status of running projects from
Team@Work server.
Filtering the content
You may
want to reduce the number of supervised projects. Team@Work supports
project filtering. Clicking on the filter icon (
)
opens a dialog where you can define several filtering rules. The top
section of the dialog is a time filter. You can enter two dates which
define a time interval that embraces the project
start.
Fields "From" and "To" in "Period" group specifies the period of interest. All projects that were (or are) active at the time of this period will be matched.
When the predefined value "[all]" is used in "From" field it means that all projects started before "To" date will be matched. By analogy, when this value is used in "To" field it means that all active projects, and all projects finished after "From" date will be matched. When the both fields are with "[all]" value all projects will be matched.
In case of mouse click inside the "From" or "To" fields the following dialog for date/time editing appears:
All field values of this dialog are persistent and will be available next time when the dialog is shown. The fields "From", "To", "Workflow filter", and "Project filter" keep cashed the last 10 different values entered.
The next section is a filter of workflow and project names. You can use wildcards '*' and '?' for selecting group of names. For example: by entering "Bro*" in the "Project filter" field you tell the server to retrieve all projects which names start with "Bro"; entering "TAW???Pro" will filter names of type "TAW100Pro", TAW150Pro" etc.
The last filter section consists of two check boxes. The first one gives you the option to include in the report the workflows that don't have any running projects. If you check this flag you may receive some nodes in the workflow tree with empty content (only a workflow name without projects). Use this option to receive the full list of workflow schemes defined in Team@Work server.
The second check box allows you to include the archived (finished) projects in the report. Please note, they are listed in a separated node of the project tree named "Archived projects", not in the corresponding workflow nodes.
The next buttons on the button bar are the command buttons for different report generators. Currently only two kind of reports are available: "Project Status" and "Gantt Chart".
To generate a report select a project name in the Workflow/Project tree and the click the corresponding report button on the button bar. The report is generated and displayed on the right panel. You can generate reports for several projects by repeating the procedure. Every new selected project appears as a tab page on the right panel. In the figure below there are three projects for which reports have been generated: "Broken frig", "Electrical grid defect" and "Repair gas equipment". Their names are visible on the tab titles.
You can generate more than one report for a single project and the corresponding reports will be displayed again as tab pages, but the tab names will appear on the bottom edge of the panel. In general: the project names are on the top, the report names are on the bottom.
You can
generate the status report for a project by selecting its name in the
left panel and clicking on the "Project status" button
.
The system generates status report and displays it on the right panel. You can generate reports for several projects consequently and all they will appear on different pages on the right panel. You can close the report for a project by clicking with right mouse button on its page name and selecting the "Close" command.
Each report contains two pages: "Active tasks" and "History".
The "Active tasks" page contains table of all project's tasks that are currently active (these tasks are in the task lists of Team@Work users). Several fields are displayed for each task:
task name
start date (when the task has been activated)
deadline (when the task should be finished according to the workflow schedule)
department to which the task is dispatched
the owner of the task (who is responsible for it). If the task is not assigned to a concrete user, this field is empty (this means that this task is still in the "Common tasks" list of the department.
The "History" page contains information about the finished tasks. The content is almost the same as in "Active tasks" page with one addition: the "Final date" column, which contains the actual date and time when the task was completed.
As it was mentioned above Team@Work Reports is a tool for real-time project supervision. Running projects may change every minute. Therefore you need to refresh the information. By pressing the "Refresh" button on the right panel you ask the server to update the current report.
You can print the report for current status of a project. It is formatted as a single table with the history on the top and active tasks on the bottom. When pressing the "Print" button, a print preview is generated. You still can change the column sizes and the column order in the preview. Then you can print the actual report.
Gantt chart is a very popular tool for displaying the project progress. It is a two-dimensional diagram. There is a time scale on the horizontal axis and a list of tasks on the vertical. The time planned/used for each task is represented as a bar on the time axis. Dependencies between tasks are displayed as arrows linking the corresponding bar ends.
The specific workflow engine implemented in Team@Work causes many specific details in generatin Gantt charts. We will discuss these details now before looking to the generating Gantt charts in Team@Work Reports application.
It is easy to see, that the information needed for creation of project Gantt chart is contained entirely into its workflow scheme: these are tasks, dependency links and time schedule. Indeed, Team@Work generates the Gantt charts automatically from the project workflow scheme. Thus Gantt charting is not a separated "decoration" but it is fully integrated into Team@Work project management suite.
In the simplest case Gantt chart is aimed only for project planning - to display the project plan on the time line. One of the most important enhancements is to use it for tracking the project progress. In this case additional bars are displayed. These bars represent the actual starting and finishing time of each task. In this case we have visual comparison between planned schedule of the project and its actual development history.
In some other applications the information about the actual project progress is inserted in the Gantt chart manually. It is not our case. Team@Work is a system for real-time project management. So it retrieves the information for the project development directly from the database and generates this part of the Gantt chart automatically. You don't need to enter any additional information. The project tracking automation is the main advantage of Team@Work Gantt charting. It allows visual comparison between the planned time schedule and the real progress at any moment.
In theory it is very easy to convert a fixed workflow scheme into a Gantt chart: just take all tasks, order them by starting date, draw bars with length equal to the task duration and finally draw arrows between bar ends to represent the dependencies. This works perfectly for simple automatic workflows.
Things become more complex when the workflow contains variants and optional links. In these cases we should have visual recognition between automatic, optional and selector links. Also when the workflow contains alternative paths which have not been passed, these paths should have been deleted from the Gantt chart as they are not a part of the actual project history. For example, lets consider that the workflow contains a state with alternative output links ("selector" group of output links). When a project moves through this state, only one of the alternative paths will be activated and all the other will be cancelled. Therefore, cancelled paths should be cleared from the Gantt chars as they are not a part of this concrete project. In some another project maybe another way will be chosen and the Gantt chart will look different (although both projects are ruled by one and the same workflow). These are the specifics when using variant workflows.
In general, when the workflow contains variant paths the chart should:
for the past part of the project: keep only these paths which actually have been passed
for the part of the project which is not completed yet: keep all links as we don't know which way will the user choose to go. The variant links are graphically distinguished from the fixed (automatic) links.
This is the way Team@Work generates the Gantt chart of the project. Starting form the full workflow scheme, the chart is refined during the project development finishing with the exact project chart at the end.
We
can generate the Gantt chart of a project by selecting the project
name in the workflow/project tree and clicking on the "Gantt
chart" button (
).
The Gantt chart is generated on the right panel.
The Gantt chart is divided on two parts: a table containing tasks and a bar graph.
The Gantt table
The table contains several columns:
Task name: contains the task name and an icon. Different icons are shown for the finished, the running and the planned tasks
Planned start: contains the date/time when the task is planned to start according to the workflow
Planned duration: how much time is planed for this task according to the workflow
Duration: the actual duration of the task. This column is filled in only for tasks that have been already finished. It contains the difference between the time when the task has been activated and the time when it has been finished.
Actual start: the time when the task has been activated (valid only for running and finished tasks)
Actual finish: the time when the task has been completed (valid only for finished tasks)
Description: this column contains the task description as it has been inserted in the workflow scheme.
As usual, this table allows the standard manipulations:
sorting on each column by clicking on the column name (it is three-state sorting: ascending, descending and "original" - as it was received from the server)
changing the column order by dragging the column name
resizing the column width by right mouse dragging on the border between columns.
The Gantt graph
The Gantt graph contains time bars and dependency links. There are two kinds of time bars: planned and actual. The planned bars are wider and are colored in light-blue. The actual bars are thinner and appear in the middle of the planned bars. They are blue (darker). Looking on both bars we can track how strictly the project plan has been followed.
Example: lets look on the figure above. The first task has started with the start of the project, but is has finished much earlier than planned (the thin bar is shorter than the thick one). As a result the two following tasks linked with the first have started earlier than it has been planned (the starting edge of the thin line is on the left compared to the thick one). Nevertheless these tasks have finished later than the planed term.
There are two time scales on the top of the graph. They are formally named "Major scale" and "Minor scale". Actually they are absolutely independent - you can set any time scale factor to them. There is some functionality connected with the major scale, which will be described below.
There are several functions connected with the Gantt chart. Thy can be activated using the toolbar buttons above the chart.
the "Refresh" button requires information from the
Team@Work server and displays the latest status of the project
the "Print" button prints the Gantt chart
the "Print preview" button also allows to print the
Gantt chart, but a preview picture is generated and displayed before
printing
the "Save Picture button generates a JPEG image from the Gantt
chart. You can save this image for further manipulations or for
inserting it into other documents
the "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" buttons allow
to change the scale of the graph for better visualization
the "Major scale" button allows to set time scale on the
major scale. A dialog appears clicking this button. Here you can set
the value and the measurement unit of the scale. Measurement units
can be minutes, hours à. up to years.
the "Minor scale" button obeys the same functionality as
the "Major scale". It is not necessary to set the minor
scale to be more fine than the major one.
You
can select a part of the Gantt chart limited by one division of the
major scale. Just click on the corresponding section header on the
Major scale and this time interval becomes selected. You can select
more sections by holding down the Shift button and continue clicking
on the neighbor sections of the major scale. When a section is
selected the "Show selection" button (
)
becomes active. By clicking on it, you can view only the selected
part of the chart. On the same time the next button, "Show all"
(
)
becomes active. Clicking on it restores the view of the whole chart.
The last
button is "Properties"
. It allows you to control how the Gantt chart is displayed and which
information it should contain.
When this action is invoked the following dialog appears:
First we will describe the button functionality:
"Default" - Current settings of all properties (in all tabs) are persisted as default properties and the dialog closed. Current Gantt chart and all subsequently created Gantt charts will have the specified properties by default.
"Restore" - Restores all properties in the dialog (in all tabs) to their hard coded default values. This causes temporary closing and reopening of the dialog already with the hard coded defaults.
Note: To accept hard coded defaults after pressing of "Restore" the user have to press: either "OK" (see below) or "Default" button. To discard changes user can press "Cancel" (see below).
"OK" - Accepts the current properties and applies changes to current Gantt chart only and closes the dialog.
"Cancel" - Discards all changes and closes the dialog.
Al the properties are grouped in several tabs:
"Chart look" tab:
Minor scale colour - the colour of minor scale gridlines
Planned colour - the colour of bars representing the planned duration of tasks
Actual colour - the colour of bars representing the actual duration of tasks
Planned link colour - the colour of links between bars of planned tasks (planned links)
Planned cycle link colour - the colour of links that close a cycle of planned tasks (usually it is impossible situation)
Activated link colour - the colour of activated links (the links connecting bars of active tasks)
Current time colour - the colour of vertical line depicting the current time (the time of Gantt chart generation)
Non-working days colour - the background colour of columns corresponding to non-working days
"Minor scale look" tab
Center text - if checked the time stamp labels of major scale will be centred, otherwise - the labels are left justified (staying close to vertical line to which corresponds)
Fill scale - if checked the major scale header is filled with the background colour specified below
Background - the background colour of major scale header
"Minor scale look" tab
Hide scale - if checked the minor scale is hidden and the Gantt chart header has a half size height
Center text - if checked the time stamp labels of minor scale will be centred, otherwise - the labels are left justified (staying close to vertical line to which corresponds)
Fill scale - if checked the minor scale header is filled with the background colour specified below
Background - the background colour of minor scale header
"Task info look" tab
Task info is the left-hand side situated table containing tasks names and other task-relating information.
Center text - if checked the header labels of task info table are centred, otherwise they are left justified
Background - the background colour of task info table
Parameters management - When this field is double-clicked the following parameters management wizard appears:
In the "Parameter" column of the table shown the task parameters are listed. To each of the task parameters corresponds one column in the info table:
Tasks - the task name
Priority - a number denoting tasks priority
Planned start - the date of planned task start
Planned finish - the date of planned task finis
Planned duration - the planned duration (in days, hours, minutes, seconds)
Duration - real duration for activated tasks only
Start - the date of task activation
Finish - the date of task completion
Description - description of task (optional)
The wizard allows definition of:
- the order of appearance of parameters in the task info table
- the visibility of parameters (all parameters except the Tasks can be hidden)
- the printability of parameters (printable parameters appears on the chart while print or save as picture actions are performed - see below)
In order to change order of parameters:
1. Check/uncheck desired parameters using check boxes on the left-hand side of their names in "Parameter" column.
2. Using buttons with arrows:
"Up" and
"Down"
move the checked parameters in the desired direction ("Up" corresponds to left in the task info table).
Note: "Up" and "Down" buttons are active only when there are checked parameters.
In order to hide some of the parameters:
1. Check/uncheck desired parameters using check boxes on the left-hand side of their names in "Parameter" column.
2. Using "Hide" button
hide checked parameters
Note: "Hide" button is active only if there are checked parameters. Tasks parameter can non be hidden.
In order to show hidden parameters:
Use "Show
all" button to do this:
Note: "Show all" button is active only if there are hidden parameters.
In order to control parameters printability:
Check/uncheck checkboxes at the "Printable" column.
Note: Tasks parameter is always printable.
Note: see also property "Maximum task info width" in tab "Sizes" below.
"Sizes" tab
Maximum task info width - relative width (0,1) that task info table can occupy:
- on the application itself: this is the relative width with respect to the Gantt chart view tab width. When the whole task info table with is larger a horizontal scroll bar appears and the table can be scrolled.
- on the printed documents (or on the print-preview pages): this is the relative width with respect to the whole page imageable width (imageable width is the page width minus left and right page margins).
Note: due to the restrictions of the physical page size the columns in the task info table that cannot be fitted to the page will not appear. If even the first column has larger width it will be truncated.
Note: the task info table columns cannot occupy more than a half of the imageable width of the page.
- on the picture, created by "Save as picture" button: this is the relative width with respect to the whole Gantt chart width.
Task info columns width - minimal width in pixels that task info columns will have.
Chart columns width - this is the preferred width in pixels of one chart column (one major scale column)
"Rules" tab
Hide non-realized paths - if checked all paths including planned tasks and their links that already cannot be realized will be hidden
Hide planned links when started - Each link can have two graphical representations: one corresponding to planned link between two planned tasks, and second corresponding to the real activation - connecting two activated tasks. If this property is checked the links of the first one type disappear.
First day of week - specifies the first day of week. For example: "Sunday" in the US, or "Monday" in France.
This report shows the organization workload at different levels. The organization structure is displayed as a hierarchical tree. Each department is presented as a node in the tree. Each node contains the following items:
one row for common tasks of the department
one row for every staff member
one row for every sub-department.
Active task count is displayed on the right side of each row. For the rows containing departments the accumulated count of tasks is displayed. The accumulated count is the sum of the department common tasks plus all personal tasks of its staff members plus accumulated tasks of all its sub-departments. Thus when you select a department row you can see the count of all running tasks in it and in all its sub-departments. In particular, on the top row, which represents the whole organization you can see the total count of all active tasks everywhere in the organization.
For a better view the departments workload is displayed graphically as well. A bar diagram is displayed on the rightmost side of the panel. Looking on it you can visually estimate and compare the relative workload of different parts of the organization.
You can sort both sides of the report: the tree and the workload. Sorting has three states: ascending, descending and "original" - by organization hierarchy.
As usual, you can refresh and print the report.
Working lists are lists of task done by a person or by a department during a defined time period.
Working
list creation is activated by
button. It is available when a department or employee from the
organization tree is selected. The action is also available with a
right mouse button click at a department or employee via popup menu.
When the action is activated the following dialog appears:
Period
The user has to specify the report period of the working list.
Note: both "From" and "To" fields must be specified.
To simplify process the user can choose one of the predefined periods in the combo box "Predefined":
last day
last week
last month
last quarter
last half year
last year
When one of these predefined values is selected the "From" and "To" fields will be automatically updated with the corresponding actual dates.
There is one more predefined value - other.
When this is selected the user can specified custom report periods directly editing the "From" and/or "To" field (see date/time dialog above).
Note: in case of direct editing of "From" or "To" field the "Predefined" field automatically switches to "other" value.
All field values of this dialog are persistent and will be available next time when the dialog is shown. The fields "From" and "To" keep cashed the last 10 different values entered.
"Options" in the dialog:
"Show completed tasks only" - if checked only completed tasks will be included in the working list.
"Show employees in sub departments" - this option is active only when a department is selected in the organization tree. In other case when an employee is selected the dialog looks like this:
If active and checked the subsequently generated working list will contains firstly all employees from the selected department, then all employees from direct sub departments, then employees of their sub departments, etc.
"Statistics: in the dialog:
"Include total statistics" - when checked at the end of working list will be included additional info:
Active at the begin of period - the number of tasks that were active at the begin of period
Incomplete at the end of period - number of tasks that were active at the end of period
Started within the period - number of tasks that were started within the period
Completed within the period - number of tasks that were finished within the period
"Show incremental statistics" - if checked a second document containing incremental statistics is generated. This statistics contains table with detailed daily statistics for the whole period. The table contains the following columns:
Date
Active tasks - the number of tasks that were active at the beginning of the corresponding day
New tasks - the number of tasks started at the corresponding day
Finished tasks - the number of tasks that were finished at the corresponding day
Distribution - graphical representation of the values from the previous three columns. It consists of three bars
the top (red) corresponds to number of Active tasks
the middle (green) - to New tasks
the bottom (blue) to Finished tasks
If "Include total statistics" is checked the aforementioned total statistics will be included also at the bottom of this document.
