Setting up a Project

Before planning a project, there are several setup steps that should be completed. This section lists these steps and explains the purpose of the setups.

Identifying Project Constraints

Project constrains include time, budget, and resources that are planned to be invested on a project. Before starting a project, you should identify:

  • The timeline of the project: when the project is estimated to begin and end.
  • The amount of money to be invested on the project.
  • The resources that will be full-time or part-time working on the project.

To ensure the project can be delivered on schedule and budge with quality, you can also identify the project delivery standards: they could be a list of measurable check points.

Setting up Resources and Resource Pools

Resources are users who are assigned to project tasks. Using Resource Management, project managers can:

  • Set the region, organization unit, and calendar of each resource.
  • Specify role and skills for each resource.
  • Specify time approver, billing approver, and delegates for each resource.
  • View capacity and assignment details for each resource.

Resource pools are a tool to track the supply of resources and are also necessary for work plan assignments. Each resource expected to be assigned to a project staffing profile or directly to a work plan must belong to a resource pool managed by the project manager. Either of the following project resource management strategies can be employed:

  • If your resources are not being actively managed, you can place all possible project resources into a single resource pool and designate all possible project managers as the resource pool's managers. This allows you to select any resource for your project staffing profile or work plan.

    Note: This strategy is not recommended if you have a large number of resources. Managing a large number of resources from a single resource pool affects performance and server stability.

  • If your resources are being actively managed in such a way that their time must be requested from their managers, a staffing profile should be used. This allows you to request resources from a resource pool you do not manage using Resource Management functionality. The resource's manager will approve or reject the request.

Cost rates for individual resources are set using cost rate rules, which are controlled through Financial Management.

For details, see the Resource Management User’s Guide and Financial Management User’s Guide .

Setting up Regions

Regions are associated with each project and resource for accurate project and resource scheduling. Regions define attributes such as:

  • Holidays

  • Normal working days and hours

  • Default currency

For details, see the Resource Management User’s Guide.

Setting up Activities

Activities are a simple configuration entity than can be associated with tasks in the project work plan. The associated activities identify the task costs as either capital or operating costs.

  • If capitalized cost is enabled for a project, and a task is associated with a capitalized activity, the task cost is categorized as capital cost.
  • If capitalized cost is enabled for a project, and a task is associated with a non-capitalized activity, the task cost is categorized as operating cost.
  • If capitalized cost is disabled for a project, a task can still be associated with an activity (be it capitalized or not), the task cost is categorized as operating cost.

You do not need to configure activities nor associate them with tasks if you are not interested in capitalized cost tracking. Project Management comes with a pre-defined set of activities reflecting common SOP 98-1 categories that can be configured for use with tasks.

For details, see the Financial Management User’s Guide.

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