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Quick Start

Describes a quick start for new teams, projects etc. and best practices.

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1. Introduction

ProjectForge® is designed to improve the efficiency of projects and project teams, from single-person projects up to large ones. This quick start walks you through the set-up of your company, your team and your first project, and shares some best practices along the way.

Haven’t installed ProjectForge yet? Start with the Installation (Docker or JAR, takes a few minutes). For configuration topics such as mail, LDAP, 2FA or backups, see the Administration guide.

The names below (users, groups, structure elements) are just examples, use your own.

After creating the users, you can use the Access wizard of a structure element to create a project with its groups and access rights in one go. This tutorial shows the steps behind the wizard, so you know what it does.

1.1. Set-up of your team members

Log in as administrator and create one account per project member (Administration → Users). In this example we start with three team members, one project manager and two developers:

Username Description (team role) E-Mail Assigned groups

linda

Project manager

linda@acme.com

PF_ProjectManager

dave

Developer

dave@acme.com

-

betty

Developer

betty@acme.com

-

1.2. Set-up your company: ACME Inc.

1.2.1. Create your company’s top level structure element

Open Structure tree (menu Project management) and add a structure element with the name of your company. Select ProjectForge’s root structure element as parent.

Name of structure element Parent structure element

ACME Inc.

ProjectForge’s root structure element

1.3. Create a group for all employees

Add a user group (Administration → Groups) named e.g. "ACME employees".

Group name Assigned members

ACME employees

Linda, Dave, Betty

1.4. Create project member group

Create another group in Administration → Groups for your project team:

Group name Assigned members

ACME web portal team

Linda, Dave, Betty

1.5. Create your project root structure element, e. g. ACME Web portal

In the structure tree, create a structure element named after your project:

Name of structure element Parent structure element

ACME web portal

ProjectForge’s root structure element

You can change the hierarchy and the names of your structure elements (e.g. for organizing your projects per customer) later, so just start with your project as top level structure element. User names, group names etc. can also be changed any time without losing any references in the system.

1.6. Assign the required team access

ProjectForge® has a very detailed access management, so you can configure which user has which access to the system. Some access rights depend on the structure elements, so define the access to a structure element under Access management (menu Administration):

Structure element Group Recursive Description Access rights

ACME Inc.

ACME employees

yes

The employees' main structure element, e.g. for time sheets not assigned to projects such as illness, holiday, research and development etc.

Choose template 'Employee'.

ACME web portal

ACME web portal team

yes

The top-level structure element of the ACME web portal project.

Choose template 'Employee'.

Many fields show a help icon or tool-tip explaining them, e.g. Recursive (includes all structure sub elements).

Now your team members are able to book time sheets on your ACME web portal project. They’re also able to give their project a sub structure, as explained in the next chapter.

2. Structure of your projects

2.1. The idea of structure trees and hierarchy

ProjectForge® supports a hierarchy of structure elements without any limits concerning the depth of your tree or the number of structure elements. A structure element is a general term which can represent customers, projects, project phases, work packages, tasks, issues and more.

We recommend organizing your projects as follows:

Level Type Description

Top level

Customer

e.g. ACME. This is useful for grouping projects per customer. You can start without this level and insert it later, if needed.

Level two

Project name

Simply the name of your project, e.g. ACME web portal.

Level three

Release

Your project will hopefully have several releases, so you can group your activities per release. In non-IT projects the release can be something such as the year of an annual conference.

Level four

Phases

Your project consists of several phases, e.g. acquisition, specification, build, maintenance.

Level five

Work packages

For large projects (more than 10 person days) it’s useful to break down your work into packages.

Level six

Issues

For very large projects you may break down your packages into issues. If you’re using JIRA, you can reference the JIRA issues in your time sheets.

Please remember: you can change your hierarchy whenever you want. Start, for example, with your project as top level structure element and insert the customer later, when you have more projects and customers.

You can add sub structure elements in the structure tree by creating a new structure element and selecting its parent. Another convenient way to organize the structure of your project is the Gantt chart (see below).

3. Time sheet booking

3.1. Adding time sheets

All team members should book every activity on the project as time sheets. The easiest way is the calendar: click on a day or select a time range to book a new time sheet, or edit an existing one. Every time sheet needs at least a start and stop time and the structure element worked on. Optionally the user can enter a reference such as a JIRA issue id. Frequently used bookings can be saved as templates.

3.2. Consumption of work packages

For having an overview at any time, we recommend to configure estimated time budgets for your structure elements. When users book time sheets on a structure element, they can instantly see its consumption. The structure tree shows the consumption of every displayed structure element.

There are two ways to configure budgets. The easiest way is to enter the budget in hours on a structure element. If a structure element has no budget of its own but its sub elements have one, its budget is calculated automatically (sum of the budgets of all sub elements). The other way is to define your budgets by assigning orders (not described here). You can mix both approaches.

4. Gantt charts

Gantt charts are a widely used technique for planning a project and keeping it on track. You can edit the Gantt parameters such as start/end dates, duration and predecessors in the structure element itself, but it’s more convenient to edit them in the Gantt chart directly.

Choose the menu entry Gantt, add a new chart and choose the structure element (project, release or project phase) you’d like to plan. In this example we choose the project’s main structure element 'ACME web portal'.

5. Cost-unit accounting

Project managers and especially controllers like reports, reports and reports. If you’d like to answer questions such as the following, use the cost features of ProjectForge® as introduced below.

  • What is the profit of our project ACME web portal and of the customer ACME overall?

  • How much did we spend on travelling for the project ACME web portal and for the customer ACME at all?

  • How much did we spend on warranty for …​?

  • How much did we spend on acquisition for …​?

  • What was the budget for R&D for our whole company?

5.1. Setting up cost objectives, requirements (optional)

The following steps enable your ProjectForge installation for cost objectives:

5.1.1. Activating cost

Enable the parameter Cost-unit accounting configured? under Administration → Configuration (takes effect after a re-login).

5.1.2. Access rights and required group of the financial administrative user

Please ensure that the financial administrative user is a member of the group PF_Finance and has read/write access to the rights Cost unit and Projects.

5.1.3. Define cost2 types

You have to define cost2 types which are valid for all structure elements and projects. Later you’ll be able to do cost calculations based on those types, e.g. how much profit you make with "maintenance" for all projects of customer ACME. Here is an example list to get an idea (feel free to find your own numbers and descriptions, you can extend this list any time later):

Number Description

00

acquisition

02

realisation (invoiced)

03

testing (invoiced)

04

maintenance (invoiced)

05

license fees (invoiced)

06

specification/documentation (invoiced)

07

warranty

08

project management (invoiced)

11

meetings

12

meetings, invoiced (invoiced)

13

travelling

14

travelling, invoiced (invoiced)

20

R&D

…​

Please note: invoiced is only a flag which you can use later in your reports and scripts.

5.1.4. Define customers and projects

For customer- or project-specific cost objectives you need to define the customers first and then the customers' projects. It’s a best practice to have a misc project for every customer for time sheets and costs which aren’t specific to a project, or for small projects without a separate cost calculation.

Customer and project numbers are free unless you configure number ranges. If the cost 2 units of your projects should be derived from the customer and project numbers, configure the number ranges before creating customers and projects, see Admin guide – Number ranges.

5.1.5. Define cost2

You can define cost2 entries independent of projects, or project-specific cost2 entries by selecting the project first.

5.1.6. Assign projects or cost2 to structure elements

You can assign projects to structure elements (in the project edit page) or add non-project-specific cost2 entries directly to a structure element. For project-specific cost assignments you can use a black/white list to reduce the available cost2 objects for a structure sub tree. Please have a look at the structure element edit page for a better understanding.

6. Calendars

Please refer to the User guide for further information.

7. Best practices

7.1. Roles: administrators, financial staff, project managers and controllers

In larger companies it’s useful to split up these roles.

7.1.1. System administrators

You should have system administrators who are responsible for managing users, groups and access rights to structure elements and functionalities (group PF_Admin).

7.1.2. Financial administrative users

Your financial administrative staff is responsible for employees (and salaries), customers, order book, cost objectives, projects as well as invoices (outgoing and incoming), see the group PF_Finance. You can specify which rights each user should have. The users of the group PF_Organization have reduced rights by default.

7.1.3. Project managers

Project managers (group PF_ProjectManager) are able to plan human resources and to organize the order book for the projects whose project manager group they’re members of (set in the project details).

7.1.4. Controllers

Members of the group PF_Controlling have read access to most areas of ProjectForge by default. Members of PF_Controlling and PF_Finance may also create, modify and run scripts (e.g. for reports). Please give this access only to users you trust: a script is able to do more than the user interface allows.