Projects

What to do first

Add a project, then give it a plan. Until a project has milestones, nothing sold against it has a date to wait on, and the screen says so rather than guessing.

The projects list

Four figures across the top:

• On schedule. How many live projects are on track, with how many are late and at risk.
• Sales exposed. Revenue standing behind a late milestone.
• Budget committed. What has been spent, against the budgets approved.
• Revenue committed. What has been sold against these projects.

The money figures are worked out, not typed. Revenue is the contract value of the client accounts pointing at a project, and spend comes from approved and paid requests in Finance › Payables.

Above the list are three tabs: Active, Delivered and Cancelled, each with its count. Active is the projects still being worked, on hold included, and it is what the four figures above describe. A project moves to Delivered or Cancelled by itself when it is closed out (see "Closing a project out" below), and back to Active when it is reopened. Delivered lists the most recently delivered first.

On Active, narrow the list with Everything, Late, At risk, On hold and Mine. On Delivered and Cancelled, show Everyone's or Mine. On every tab you can pick a kind of project from Every kind, or search by project, client or owner. Each row shows the project's status, client, next milestone and its date, owner, revenue, how much of the budget is used, and its open issues. Archived projects, whatever their status, sit under Show archive at the foot of the list.

Kinds of project

Add project first asks what sort of project it is, and the form then asks for what that kind needs. The kinds on offer depend on your workspace.

• Client delivery. Work delivered for a client. It asks which engagement it delivers and the date it was promised by, and that engagement's payments can wait on the project's milestones.
• Internal initiative. Something the company does for itself, such as an office move or a system change, with a line saying what it is for.
• Other project. Anything else: a name, an owner, a budget and a plan.
• Development (real estate workspaces). An estate or building under construction. It asks for the site, its title and building approval, what is being built and how many units, the contractor and consultants, the target completion and the listings it builds. Its plan starts as a ten-stage schedule of work, each stage weighted by its share of the build; Spread across the dates lays the stages between the start and the target completion in proportion to their weights. The form shows the weights against 100 so you can see when they do not add up.
• Furnishing programme (real estate workspaces). Furnishing the allocated units of an estate, with the package a unit gets. Its units are opened from Furnishing, so there is no plan to type here.

A project made before kinds existed reads as an "Other project". The card on the right of a project's page shows its kind, its dates and its details, and Edit project changes them.

A project's page

Across the top are Close project (or Reopen) and Edit project, then the thread: the records this project came from and leads to. Under it, five figures:

• Plan. Milestones done out of all of them, and the one it is on now.
• Work. Tasks done out of all of them, and how many are overdue.
• Budget used. Spend against the budget.
• Revenue sold, which reads Revenue exposed while the project is late.
• Open issues, and how many of them are serious.

Then the tabs: Plan, Tasks, Issues, Evidence, Money, Goals and Close-out. A development or furnishing project also has Schedule, Site reports, Units and Materials (see Real estate operations). The Tasks and Issues tabs show their open count.

The right-hand column stays whichever tab is open: the project's kind and details, Next up, Linked records, and On the schedule, which lists what is booked for the project on Work › Schedule.

The plan

The Plan tab has a Timeline and the Milestones list. The timeline draws each milestone as a bar up to its date, with the first promised date drawn faintly behind it when the date has moved, a diamond for any payment waiting on the milestone, and a gold line for today.

Milestones are listed in date order, earliest first. The current milestone is the first one not yet complete. Each row shows its state, its owner, its date (with "moved" when the date has changed) and the work under it: how many tasks are done out of how many, how many are overdue and how many are blocked. A milestone marked complete over tasks that are still open says how many are still open.

Each milestone row gives you three ways in:

• The name opens the milestone's side panel over the project.
• Expand opens the milestone's own full page.
• Edit changes its name, state, owner and date. Changing the date later keeps the date it was first promised for.

A milestone's side panel

The panel opens from a milestone's name, from the timeline, and from Next up. It shows the milestone's facts, then:

• Progress. Its state as a row of buttons (Not started, In progress, Blocked, Complete) with the tasks done under it. Its owner or a manager can move it.
• Evidence. What the milestone asks for before it can be completed, what has been captured, and the approval if one is needed.
• Issues. Anything raised on the milestone, and Raise an issue. This is the one place to say something is in the way: raise an issue and choose the kind Blocker, and it gets an owner and a clock.
• Tasks. Every task under the milestone, each with a box. Blocked tasks come first, marked Blocked, and the section says how many there are. Tick a box to mark the task done, or tick it again to reopen it, without leaving the plan. The milestone's count updates straight away. Add a task in the line at the top; Enter adds it.
• Updates. Notes on where the milestone stands, written with Post update.

Tapping a task's name opens that task's own side panel over the plan. The project stays on the Plan tab, and closing the task brings you back to the milestone's panel.

The Expand icon in the panel's header, beside Close, opens the milestone's full page. Edit milestone at the foot opens the edit form.

Milestone dates and the tasks under them

A task under a milestone cannot be due after the milestone's date.

• The date picker on a task stops at the milestone's date, and the form shows "By" and the date beside it.
• Moving a task under an earlier milestone brings its date in to that milestone's date.
• If you type a later date anyway, the save is refused with a sentence naming the milestone and its date. Pick that day or earlier, or move the milestone first.
• When a milestone's date moves earlier, tasks due after the new date move with it. When it moves later, the tasks stay where they are.

Next up

Next up, on the right of a project's page, says what moves the project on.

At the top is the next milestone by date: its name, its date, how far off or how late it is, and how many of its tasks are done. Tapping it opens the milestone's side panel.

Under it are up to five open tasks to pick up, in this order:

1. Late work.
2. The next milestone's work.
3. Anything due this week.
4. The rest.

Each task shows who has it and when it is due. Tapping one opens its side panel. Blocked work is counted rather than listed, and anything that did not fit is counted as "more open on the Tasks tab". Underneath, the project's thread says what finishing the next milestone unlocks, such as a payment becoming ready to invoice.

Tasks

The Tasks tab lists the project's work grouped by milestone, filtered by status and by date. Add task opens the task form: the task, its detail, its owner, its due date, its priority, its estimated hours, the milestone it works towards, and the key result it answers, if any.

A task's owner sees it in My work and in Work › Tasks. Opening a task opens the same side panel everywhere in Rople, with its status, notes, documents, evidence, issues, its estimate and contractor, and Book on the schedule. A task's status menu offers your workspace's own statuses (see Meetings and tasks).

A task can be marked done by the person it is assigned to, the person who created it, or the project's owner.

Sub-tasks

A task can be broken into sub-tasks, one level deep. A sub-task is a task of its own: its own owner, due date, priority and status, in its owner's My work with the task it belongs to named in its line. It sits on the same project and milestone as its parent and counts toward that milestone. A sub-task is due on or before its milestone's date, like any task under the milestone.

Open the parent task and its panel shows Sub-tasks, with "3 of 5 done" and a bar. Tick one there, add one in the line underneath (Enter adds it), or open one to its own panel. A sub-task's panel names its parent and offers Make this a task of its own.

Marking the parent done while sub-tasks are open is allowed, and the sub-tasks stay open.

Issues, evidence, money and goals

• Issues lists everything raised on the project, its milestones and its tasks, with Raise an issue. See Quality and issues.
• Evidence shows each milestone's evidence in date order: what it asks for, what has been captured, and whether it is approved. Evidence is a file on the milestone's page or a task's page, a document attached to one of its tasks, or a record in the workspace linked as proof. Whoever plans the milestone sets how many items it needs and whether it needs an approval. The project's lead or a senior manager approves. A milestone that asks for evidence cannot be completed until it has it.
• Money shows the budget, what has been spent, the revenue sold and the margin; spend against budget line by line; the payments on the engagement's billing schedule that wait on each milestone; and the cost of the work, with estimated labour for managers.
• Goals shows which key results and KPIs the project contributes to, and by how much.

Counts that keep up

The figures on a project update when its work changes, without a refresh. Ticking a task in a milestone panel, editing one in its panel or changing a status on the board updates the milestone counts, the Plan and Work figures, Next up and the board together. Coming back to the browser tab reads them again, so changes other people made show up too.

Closing a project out

Close project opens a dialog, because the project's promises become measurements at that moment. Close it as delivered or cancelled.

Delivered lists every contribution the project promised to a key result or KPI, with the promise already filled in. Accept it where the project delivered what it said, or change the number and give a reason where it did not. Cancelled releases nothing, and says so. Open tasks stay open either way.

Once it is closed, the project leaves the Active tab for Delivered or Cancelled. It stops counting in the figures at the top of Projects and on Home, its late milestones stop raising alerts, it stops putting overdue milestones, unheld tasks and missing site reports in its owner's My work, and it is no longer offered when somebody adds new work or starts a workflow run on a project.

Reopen puts a closed project back on the Active tab and takes back what it released.

Work › Schedule

The Schedule is one week of who is doing what: people, contractors and resources, each with their bookings for the week.

• Move between weeks with Previous, This week and Next, and show Everything, People, Contractors or Resources. Only rows with something on hides the empty rows.
• Book books a person, a contractor or a resource (or all three) for a day or a run of days, against a task, a project or an engagement. Click an empty day on a row to book it, and click a booking to move or cancel it.
• A person's bar is the hours booked plus the estimated hours of their tasks due that week, against the hours they work less time off. A booked task counts once.
• Clashes (two bookings for the same person, contractor or resource at once) are hatched and listed, not refused, and the header counts them and anybody over capacity.
• Due and not scheduled lists the week's tasks with no booking, each with Schedule it.
• Time off records leave, sickness, training, a public holiday or time away. The Schedule and everybody's capacity read it.

Anybody can book themselves and resources. Booking somebody else is for team leads (level 2) and above, and recording time off for somebody else is for managers (level 3) and above.

A task's panel has Book on the schedule, and a project's page lists what is booked for it under On the schedule.

How it connects

• Clients and accounts is where the committed revenue comes from. A client delivery project names the engagement it delivers.
• Payments on an engagement's billing schedule can wait on a milestone, and become ready to invoice when it is complete (see Billing and collections).
• Requests raised in My requests and payables can name the project they are for. Once paid, they are the project's spend.
• Overdue milestones, unassigned work and your tasks appear in My work.
• Contributions released at close-out feed Goals and KPIs.

Common questions

Why does my project show no revenue? Because no client account points at it yet. Revenue arrives when a sale is closed against the project, not when somebody types a value.

Why can I not pick a later due date for this task? Because the task is under a milestone, and a task is due on or before its milestone's date. Pick that day or earlier, or ask whoever plans the project to move the milestone.

Can a milestone be completed early, or with tasks still open? Yes. If it still has open tasks, the screen says how many. A milestone that asks for evidence, or an approval, cannot be completed until it has them.

I ticked a task in the milestone panel and it was refused. Only the person a task is assigned to, the person who created it, or the project's owner can mark it done. The message says so, and the box goes back.

Who can close a project? Team leads (level 2) and above.