Project Management

Pandora ITSM allows dynamic project management including planning, monitoring and reporting. So it is possible to plan times (and costs) and also to see project evolution over time thanks to the allocation of hours of the people collaborating in projects. This hour allocation may be done in detail, in the form of Workunits specifically assigned to each task (and task incidents, if there is one or some) of the project.

Pandora ITSM allows some automatic actions such as cost calculation, notifications about changes in tasks and milestones. It also includes a Gantt chart that makes it easy to see task distribution over time.

Project management in Pandora ITSM combines projects, tasks, roles and people. The tasks created within each project may have, in turn, subtasks, thus establishing hierarchical structures.

Tasks may have tickets associated with the incidences that arise or work units, where the work performed by each person may be tracked with a time breakdown.

In this view you may set a user in charge of the project (by default the user creating the project), a project group and an e-mail address (CC field), which will be used to send notifications related to the project, among other data (start date, Project types, etc.). It is also possible to replicate tasks already created in another project.

Starting with version 106, and to facilitate the CRM process, a project can be associated to a company or contract as long as none of the tasks of that project is associated to a company or contract (and vice versa).

When you enter project editing by default you are taken directly to the Project overview tab .

The section that can be edited in this view is Details. When clicking Quick edit the main project fields such as project group, status template and tag template can be changed.

The other sections present important information in summary form.

This project editing window has the following tabs:

• Task planning.
• Board view.
• Gantt Chart.
• Milestones.
• Complete edition of the project (exactly the same project creation interface).

At the bottom, in addition:

• Notes (version 106 or later).
• Tracker.
• Attachments.
• Members where you can add or remove users globally to the project (list of users available for tasks and other work).
• Budget.

This section presents the people involved in the project and from which you can add new users with different roles (button Add role people) or manage the existing ones (icon in each person's cell, just to the left side of their role in the project).

Within the projects, different tasks in which people will participate will be created. These people can participate both in the project, globally, and in the tasks themselves with a specific role in each case. Individually, at the task level, these roles can be readjusted.

Section Statistics with relevant data on the project:

Sections Work distribution and Task distribution with graphs in percentages:

Project activity section:

Budget tab with percentage of project profitability and other important values:

Project tracker tab:

In this view the list of created tasks will appear and can be sorted by column. To do so, the column by which the list is sorted will show a black triangle icon pointing up or down (ascending or descending) in each column header.

In the Hours worked column you can access a pop-up window with summary information of the work units carried out in that task, such as cost, hours worked, etc. and with the option to filter by dates and/or milestones and/or people. In the case of having incidents associated with the project and its comments (work units), it should be filtered by the complete user identifier in Task people involved and start date. All this information, once filtered again, can be exported in CSV format and imported into a spreadsheet.

In the column labeled Op. you can:

• See the Members icon people who are involved in each task.
• Add a incident (ticket) in the Issues icon . In order for the cost of the work units (expressed as comments) to be posted to the task (and thus to the project) a role must be assigned and the Add to project`s cost option checked on each of them at the time of creation. See also “Creating new work units from the task scheduler”.
• Add one or multiple work units to the task by clicking the Work units icon .
• Edit task .
• Delete the task definitely .

To create a task use the Create button located at the bottom of the task list.

Initially a task is created with its basic data, such as the start and end dates (with the option to send e-mails at that time to the people who become part of the task), the task owner and the estimated number of hours.

Once created, the next logical step is to edit the task to assign resources (people) to it.

After a task is created, it is immediately edited in order to assign resources (people, Add users to task section) and time-based target costs, tags, as well as a criticality or priority for it.

From here, and based on the hour allocation to that task by the users assigned to it, it will be possible to find out the deviations in time, deviations in costs and deviations in the planning on the resources hours/person. Pandora ITSM automatically generates these indexes that can be checked in real time.

The task progress may also be automatically tracked according to the hours that people are working and recorded in work units, for that, the token Progression based on hours must be enabled.

Finally, in the task (Tasks links section you will be able to chronologically relate the rest of the tasks with the task you are editing:

• Star to start: All tasks added in this section cannot start before the task being edited starts.
• Finish to start: All tasks added in this section cannot start before the task being edited is finished.
• Finish to finish: All tasks added in this section cannot finish before the task being edited finishes, although it may finish later on.

• Project manager.
• System engineer.
• Junior consultant.
• Junior programmer.
• Senior programmer.
• Analyst.
• Senior consultant.
• Support engineer.

Roles to be used by different people may be created in this section. To edit each one, click on the name of the role in the list that appears.

The costs of each task are calculated based on the costs of each role (person hours) and the additional costs charged (in the form of expense invoices, additional expenses or any other formula) that are directly attributed to the task (and therefore to the project).

Pandora ITSM keeps track of virtually all those sections or items of information that are susceptible to change. In the case of the task, it records all operations of opening, closing, changing and adding information, either as a work unit or as an attached file.

The task's Work Units will remain linked to the task even if it is moved to a new project or parent task.

The work units of a project may be created from the task scheduler by clicking on the corresponding button (recommended option) or from the user section, People → Work unit → Add work unit menu.

By manually creating work units, you may allocate time to a project and task.

• In the case of ticket work units, they will automatically impute the total time of the ticket when it is assigned to a task, has a role assigned and the option Add to project`s cost.
• For these individual work units, which will be added manually by the user, time will be allocated directly as entered when creating the work unit. The creation form has a number of basic fields (description, number of hours spent on the work unit, cost, role, etc.).

It also offers controls that allow you to “split” the work unit into blocks of an equal number of hours (4 by default) and distribute that time into different Work Units (WU) over time (forward or backward, as you choose) with the same content as the original, except for the date.

There are two special cases covered by Pandora ITSM:

• Remote work (Work from home).
• Work units without assigned project/task.

These concepts correspond to special tasks within a special project that are computed differently.

There is also a special section (People → Work unit → Vacations and sick leave menu) to cover cases of absence due to illness or medical assistance and vacations.

Starting with version 108, powerful custom field functionality is available in tasks, allowing you to add additional information in a classified manner (numerical, text, dates, etc.). All this information can then be filtered and used for administrative and/or organizational purposes. With slight differences, the overall functionality is similar to the custom fields in tickets.

First, you must create at least one task type and then add the necessary custom fields:

Then, when editing a project task, select the task type and its custom fields will appear:

A milestone is a task of zero duration that represents an important date or point in time in a project, such as the completion of a project stage, or the delivery date of a particular report. Milestones may be used to filter information in reports or in searches related to a project.

The milestones support the creation of custom fields with the Milestone fields button. In the creation of each custom field you can define:

1. Name: It is required, names may be repeated.
2. Field visibility: To display the custom fields in the milestone list.
3. Type:

• Text: Single-line text type.
• Text area: Text type, multi line.
• Combo: To display a list of options to choose from, its elements must be separated by commas.
• Checkbox: To select values of true and false.

Files attached to a project may be uploaded, downloaded or deleted. Optionally, a description may be added, which is useful for keyword searches. The search may also be performed by location (project, incidents or work units) of the files and/or by storage date.

Files in source code format (.php, .pl, etc.) cannot be uploaded and it is recommended to compress the files before uploading.

This utility allows to display all project tasks, as well as their chronological relationship as a series of steps, when finishing a task it links to the next one. It also allows to add new tasks (or sub tasks by clicking on + of each task), related or not. Relationships are set up by clicking on the end of a task (circle icon) and then dragging it to the start of its next corresponding task.

Existing tasks can be modified in their start and end date, as long as they are not related to other tasks. For tasks related to each other, there is a limitation between the end of one task and the start of the next one.

You may choose the actual view (Show real planning list) to compare the schedule with the tasks performed on a monthly, weekly or daily basis.

At the end of the projects, they can be moved to an archived state, saving all the information they contain.

A project that is subsequently archived can be deleted, thus removing all its tasks. The work units it contains become “orphans” and will not be assigned to any project or task, although they will still exist.

To archive a project just click on the archive button of each project: menu Projects → Project list → Actions → Archive . Automatically that project will be moved to the archived projects view. Such projects do not automatically notify neither task, project nor milestone(s) closure.

Archived projects can be reactivated from the archived projects view: Projects → Project list → Actions → Unarchive or, on the contrary, delete them permanently with the Delete action .

The Board view allows you to visually manage tickets and tasks belonging to a project.

It is important to note that there is a horizontal scroll bar at the end of the screen, in order to show all the columns (status) of a project.

The central mechanism of the Dashboard View is the filter section, which allows you to organize task information in columns:

Selecting the users involved and/or percentage of task performed and/or tags assigned to the tasks, among other values, may be filtered by clicking the Apply filters button:

Each column may be collapsed or expanded as needed and within each column the filtered tasks will have their own quick options for editing, creating Work Units, moving the task, copying it, deleting it (or even leaving the Dashboard View to edit the task in a new screen):

In turn, by default, each task will appear collapsed with its own expand or collapse button.

In each column, all tasks may be selected (or by pressing the CTRL key and clicking on each task to select or exclude them from the selection) and then moved in bulk to another column:

With all these options you may monitor and/or reorganize an entire project in a short time: set dates, create new tasks and assign them, delay or bring work forward, and more.

There are four statuses created by default which may only be modified (users with PM permission or superadmin):

• Pending.
• In process.
• Completed.
• Verified.

Further statuses may be added, reordered and/or deleted using the Up, Down, Delete buttons on each line:

All projects maintain their configured statuses, which are now in the system default template. Templates may be created for each project in order to have customized statuses for each particular project.

The file to download contains the following headers in the first line:

ID,Project,Parent Task,Task name,Description,Completion,Work units hours,Status,Priority,Start,End,Estimated hours,Cost,Periodicity,Start period,Interval hours,CC,Send email,Set hours,Involved people,Tags

If you connect through HTTPS to the Web Console, the download will be automatic; if HTTP is used, it may be necessary to enable an exception in the web browser to maintain the download.

Three labels are included by default ( Low, Medium, High ) in case you wish to use them, but they may be modified as desired (or even deleted).

By clicking Create, new labels may be added, choosing the background colour and text colour for quick visual identification in the board view.

When creating or editing each task, at the end, right next to the description box, one or more (or all) tags may be added and will be included when saving the changes made.

From this version on, projects keep their inherited tags, which belong to the new default tag template. That way you may create more templates, even one for each project, so they are no longer global (unless you decide to keep only the new default template).

Each project has the option to use any of the different tag templates available with the caveat that each time the template is changed, the tags added to the tasks will be deleted.

This option allows you to save messages for internal use, as a logbook.

You may then filter searches by keywords. This is the only way to access it, as these notes are excluded from system reports.

By default, when installing Pandora ITSM, four rules are inserted, which are deactivated. Each rule can be applied at project and/or task level by means of a series of conditions.

The list of rules highlights the execution mode, Cron to be applied periodically by the OS hosting the PITSM server or Real time when users trigger events as they perform their work with each project.

• To create a new workflow rule in projects (or edit one of them) you must click on the Create a workflow button and place a name optionally, otherwise when saving by means of the Create button it will be numbered consecutively automatically.

• The next step is to go to the Conditions tab and click the Create button to set the fields and conditions to be met (project and/or project tasks). Important: Clicking Create again will save the changes regardless of whether a description and/or any conditions have been set.

• Once the necessary conditions have been created, they can be related to each other with logical operators (by default OR, which allows to execute the actions if one rule or another is fulfilled). The order of the check can also be set, some frequent or very necessary conditions will be placed at the top of the checklist using the Up or Down buttons, as appropriate:

The last step is the Actions tab to add the actions to send e-mail to a user or users, change the project administrator, etc, when all the conditions of a rule have been met.

In the Email template settings, the following macros may be used:

A general description of the available project reports is provided for your advanced options: “Project reports”. Each of these reports has the option of full screen display and export in CSV and PDF format (“Project bundle of hours report” may only be exported in PDF).

After selecting a project, it shows by default the project view (Show project) which includes the basic data, total people and hours worked, total budget and broken down by role with average hourly cost, in a graph the percentage distribution of tasks and in another graph the work distribution among the people involved. Finally, it shows the activity graph and a summary of each of the tasks.

• By activating Show task activity, you will have to select one or several tasks and at the end, it will show the activity of each task, as well as the hours worked, cost and distribution of the work to the people assigned to each task.
• Select Show task work unit and the selected tasks will show in detail the work units performed for each task.

Finally by enabling Show in table, all tasks will be shown in tabular form with owners, priority, people involved and task status.

By default it shows projects from the last year (a different date may be specified) as well as archived projects. Projects with no start or end date should be requested with the date 0000-00-00. If the project types have custom fields, it will also be possible to filter by this criterion, always taking into account the project start date.

By default it shows the projects of the last month, with the option to show the amounts of each task with the Show task breakdown option.

When selecting a specific project, it is possible to filter by milestones.

It allows you to select a particular project and month. It displays basic project information, summary information of the tasks performed and related incidents. It ends with the totalization of hours used and remaining hours.

Pandora ITSM allows logical project grouping through this option in order to organize or classify projects that share development features. A name must be given, which may be repeated, and optionally an icon that differentiates it from other project groups.

To edit a project, click on the corresponding project icon .

Through this feature Pandora ITSM allows differentiating projects. This is useful when having a large number of projects and performing quick searches in the project list.

Unlike Project groups, the following custom fields may be added to project types:

• Text type (single and multi-line)
• True and false option.
• Numeric type.
• Date type.
• List of options (Combo).
• Lists with hierarchically related options.
• Type of URL together with a description of the URL.

These custom field values may also be filtered by exact values in the project list.

Custom fields share three features in common:

1. Show in the projects list: When this option is enabled, this custom field will be displayed as a column in the project list.
2. Global field: By enabling this option, the custom field will be added to the existing project types and also to the future ones to be created.
3. Required: If this option is enabled, you will always be required to set or choose a value in order to save the changes.

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