Team Dashboard Users Manual

Table of Contents

1. Using the Process Dashboard for Team Projects - Overview
1.1. Obtaining the Process Dashboard with Team Features
1.2. Tailoring the Process Dashboard for Your Organization
1.2.1. Selecting a Metrics Collection Framework (Coach)
1.2.2. Creating / Customizing Process Forms and Reports
1.2.2.1. Creating Forms for Organizational Use
1.2.2.2. Configuration Management of Custom Forms
1.2.3. Plan Team Dashboard Deployments (Process Mentor / Coach)
1.3. Preparing for a Team Project Launch
1.3.1. Setup Team Dashboard Data Storage (Team Leader)
1.3.1.1. Using a Network Directory for Team Data
1.3.1.1.1. Network Directory Team Dashboard Creation
1.3.1.2. Using Cloud Storage for Team Data
1.3.1.2.1. Cloud Storage Team Dashboard Creation
1.3.1.2.2. Cloud Storage Team Member Setup
1.3.1.2.3. Cloud Storage Team Dashboard Sharing
1.3.1.2.4. Migrating Existing Team Data to Cloud Storage
1.3.1.2.5. Manual Registration of Less Common Cloud Storage Providers
1.3.1.3. Using Process Dashboard Enterprise Server for Team Data
1.3.1.3.1. Enterprise Server Team Dashboard Creation
1.3.1.3.2. Migrating Existing Team Data into the Enterprise Server
1.3.2. Install Process Dashboard
1.3.2.1. Installing on Windows
1.3.2.2. Installing on Mac OS X
1.3.2.3. Installing on Unix/Linux
1.3.2.4. Installing Launcher for Enterprise Server
1.3.3. Create a Team Project (Team Leader)
1.3.4. Invite Team Members to Join Team Project (Team Leader)
1.3.5. Join Team Project (Team Members)
1.3.6. Conditional: Add Member Schedules to Team Schedule (Team Leader)
1.3.7. Create or Obtain Forms and Reports for Project Use
1.3.8. Optional: Create Master Project (Program Leader)
1.3.9. Add Team Projects to Master Project (Program Leader)
1.3.10. Define Top-Down Tasks for Master Project (Program Leader)
2. Using the Dashboard During a Team Project Launch
2.1. Enter List of Team Members
2.2. Plan Overall Project Strategy
2.2.1. Documenting Ownership/Responsibilities
2.2.2. Using Proxies to Estimate Size and Time
2.2.3. Size Metrics
2.2.4. Iterations and Milestones
2.3. Plan Project Development Process
2.3.1. High-Maturity Personal Planning
2.3.2. Reusing Workflows via Libraries
2.4. Plan Project Support Tasks
2.5. Develop Balanced Project Plan
2.5.1. Refining Project Components
2.5.2. Creating, Estimating, and Assigning Tasks
2.5.3. Keeping the Workload Balanced
2.5.3.1. Balancing within a Subteam
2.5.4. Editing Task Details
2.6. Master Project Coordination and Planning
2.6.1. Opening the Work Breakdown Structure
2.6.2. Sharing Team Dashboard Access
2.6.3. Viewing Consolidated Master Project Planning Data
2.7. Create Individual Team Member Plans
2.7.1. Synchronize Work Breakdown Structure
2.7.2. Review Planned Tasks and Schedule
2.7.3. Export Personal Data
2.8. View Bottom-Up Team Plan
2.9. Create Quality Plan
2.9.1. Workflow-Driven Quality Plans
2.9.2. Overarching Quality Plans
2.10. Exploring Alternative Plans
2.10.1. Option 1: Saving Multiple Alternative Plans
2.10.2. Option 2: Exploring Scope/Schedule Tradeoffs Using Milestones
2.11. Save Backup of Project Data
2.11.1. Submitting Data to the SEI
2.11.2. Creating HTML Snapshots
2.12. Editing the Work Breakdown Structure
2.12.1. Inserting Common Team Workflows
2.12.2. Using Workflow Rates on Older Projects
2.12.2.1. Entering Workflow Rates
2.12.2.2. Applying Rate-Driven Workflows
2.12.3. Importing Tasks from Microsoft Project
2.12.4. Editing Metrics in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor
2.12.4.1. Custom WBS Columns
2.12.4.2. Custom Tabs
2.12.5. Allowing Team Members to Edit the Work Breakdown Structure
2.12.5.1. Special Editing Behavior for Team Members
2.12.6. Simultaneous Editing of the Work Breakdown Structure
2.12.7. Understanding the Role of the Work Breakdown Structure
2.12.8. Editing the WBS After Project Launch
2.12.8.1. Common Mistakes
2.12.8.2. Understanding
2.12.8.3. Subdividing Tasks
3. Running a Team Project
3.1. Team Members
3.1.1. Collecting Earned Value Metrics (Team Member)
3.1.2. Refining your Personal Project Plan (Team Member)
3.1.3. Managing Your Personal Earned Value Schedule (Team Member)
3.1.4. Managing Process Metrics (Team Member)
3.1.4.1. Entering Defects
3.1.4.2. Entering Size Data
3.1.4.2.1. Entering Size Data on Older Projects
3.1.4.3. Reviewing Project Metrics
3.1.5. Team Data Collaboration
3.1.5.1. Synchronizing the Work Breakdown Structure
3.1.5.2. Exporting Personal Data
3.2. Team Management (Team Leader, Managers)
3.2.1. Tracking Project Progress
3.2.1.1. Project Plan Summary
3.2.1.2. Earned Value Reports
3.2.1.3. Project Data Scanner
3.2.1.4. Analyzing Filtered Data Using Labels
3.2.1.5. Analyzing Filtered Data Using Groups
3.2.2. Managing the Team Plan
3.2.2.1. Reassigning Tasks
3.2.2.2. Reviewing Changes in the Team Plan
3.2.2.3. Bringing Problems to the Team's Attention
3.2.2.4. Exploring What-if scenarios
3.2.2.5. Preparing for Project Relaunch
3.2.2.6. Closing a Project
3.2.3. Managing Team Data
3.2.3.1. Importing/Exporting Data
3.2.3.2. Backing Up Project Data
3.2.3.3. Using the Quick Launcher
3.2.4. Analyzing Process Metrics
3.2.4.1. Current Project Workflow Metrics
3.2.4.2. To Date Workflow Metrics
3.2.4.3. Configuring Workflow Mappings
3.2.5. Managing Permissions and Privacy
3.2.5.1. Editing Roles
3.2.5.2. Editing Users
3.2.5.3. Permission Grant Latency
3.2.5.4. Data Privacy
3.2.5.4.1. Data Privacy Considerations
3.2.5.4.2. Competing Needs
3.2.5.4.3. Spheres of Data Ownership
3.2.5.4.4. Data Privacy Permissions
                                                                                                                                                                          

1. Using the Process Dashboard for Team Projects - Overview

Process Mentor / Coach
Organizational Preparation Install Process Dashboard with Team Features
  
Select Metrics Collection Framework
  
Create Forms and Reports for Organizational Use
  
Plan Team Dashboard Deployments
 
  Program Manager Team Leader Team Members
Launch Preparation Setup Team Dashboard Data Storage
 
Install Process Dashboard with Team Features Install Process Dashboard
 
Create Master Project Create Team Project
 
Add Team Projects to Master Project Invite Team Members to Join Team Project
Join Team Project
Create or Obtain Forms and Reports for Project Use
 
 
Project Launch Tasks Define Top-Down Tasks for Master Project
 
Enter List of Team Members
 
View Consolidated Master Project Planning Data Plan Overall Project Strategy
 
Plan Project Development Process
 
Plan Project Support Tasks
 
Develop Balanced Project Plan
 
Synchronize Work Breakdown Structure
 
Edit Planned Task Schedule
 
Export Data
Import Data
 
View Bottom-Up Team Plan
 
Create Quality Plan
 
Save Backup of Project Data
 
 
Run the Project Track Project Progress Collect Earned Value Metrics
 
Manage Team Plan Refine Personal Project Plan
 
Manage Team Data Manage Personal Earned Value Schedule
 
Analyze Process Metrics Manage Process Metrics
 
Manage Permissions and Privacy  

1.1. Obtaining the Process Dashboard with Team Features

The Process Dashboard is a powerful and flexible tool for software process automation, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. By automating and simplifying metrics collection and analysis, the Process Dashboard makes it easier to use high-maturity processes such as the Personal Software Process (SM) and the Team Software Process (SM).

The Process Dashboard contains an embedded process engine which provides unprecedented integration of metrics data with process scripts, forms, and other documents. This engine reads process definitions as simple XML, HTML, and text files, and provides a user interface which helps individuals to use the process. Because process definitions are not hard-coded into the application, anyone can create a new process definition to use with the dashboard. Ready-made process definitions can also be installed if desired - including process frameworks that support high-maturity teams, as described in this document.

The open source Process Dashboard can be downloaded by visiting:

http://www.processdash.com/

Additional process definitions, documentation, and other materials can be downloaded from:

http://www.tuma-solutions.com/

You may receive this installation program either as a CD-ROM, a ZIP file, or a JAR file. If you receive the ZIP file, you can unzip it and burn the contents onto a CD-ROM; although this step is not required, it may simplify the task of installing the dashboard on team members' computers.

The installer program doubles as an upgrader for previous versions of the dashboard. Therefore, if individuals have an earlier version of the dashboard installed on their computer (for example, from taking a PSP (SM) course), they can safely perform this installation process to upgrade the software. It is not necessary to uninstall the dashboard before upgrading.

Personal Software Process(SM), PSP(SM), Team Software Process(SM), and TSP(SM) are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard or its associated PSP/TSP modules.

1.2. Tailoring the Process Dashboard for Your Organization

Every organization is different, and high-maturity teams have differing needs from their metrics support tools. The Process Dashboard strives to meet these needs by offering a high degree of customizability to support different processes.

1.2.1. Selecting a Metrics Collection Framework (Coach)

When implementing any metrics program, an organization must decide upon a well-defined set of process metrics that they will collect. Without precisely-defined metrics, data collected by individuals cannot meaningfully be consolidated and analyzed at the team level.

For high-maturity processes inspired by PSP (SM) and TSP (SM), these definitions include:

It can be challenging to identify these on a new project, so the Process Dashboard provides metrics collection frameworks, which offer a core set of default phases and metrics. Three different frameworks are provided based on the type of work your team is performing:

The dashboard has historically allowed organizations to create their own custom frameworks, so you may see additional options to choose from when you create a project. But the need for custom frameworks has diminished over time with the addition of support for custom size metrics and workflow process analysis.

1.2.2. Creating / Customizing Process Forms and Reports

The Process Dashboard contains a powerful editor for defining custom process forms and reports. This editor makes it possible to customize the forms for a process directly in you web browser.

To access this editor, you must first create a team project according to the steps described in the Create a Team Project help topic. Then in the main Team Dashboard window, select the project from the tree on the left, and click the first item in the list on the right to open the team Rollup Plan Summary.

The Team Project Plan Summary is divided horizontally into two panes: a navigation pane on the left, and a detail pane on the right.

Each pane contains an icon in the top-right corner () that you can click to edit the contents.

While editing, you can add items to the page by clicking the Add Item link at the bottom, delete items by clicking the red X in their top-right corner, and rearrange items by dragging their title bar. Many items allow you to select a list of process metrics to display; simply type part of a metric name, and the field will show matching metrics. If you are completely uncertain about the name of a particular metric, just type a space into the empty text field to see the complete list of metrics that are available for that type of item. When you are done editing, remember to click the Save button at the bottom of the page.

1.2.2.1. Creating Forms for Organizational Use

The custom forms editor makes it extremely simple for team leaders to define the forms and reports they need to manage a project. Of course, process mentors need access to this functionality as well, but may not already have a team project at their disposal - particularly when initially tailoring the dashboard for use within their organization. As a result, process mentors will need to create a temporary team project in their dashboard, and set it up using the Team Project Setup Wizard, before they can use this editor. Once the organization begins its first real project, this temporary project can be deleted.

1.2.2.2. Configuration Management of Custom Forms

The Process Dashboard does not currently perform any configuration management of the forms created using this editor. As a result, an organizational process mentor will almost certainly want to perform this task on their own.

The definition of a custom form is saved as a single XML file. You can find this file under the cms subdirectory of the folder where team dashboard configuration data is stored. For example, if you asked the installer to place team configuration data in the T:\team\teaminstance directory, custom form definitions will be saved in the T:\team\teaminstance\cms directory. If you cannot recall where you asked the installer to place team configuration data, open the Team Dashboard, choose "Help → About Process Dashboard," and click on the Configuration tab.

Currently, a particular dashboard dataset will use a single definition of a custom form for each metrics collection framework; this definition will be shared by all team projects within that dashboard dataset using that metrics collection framework.

Custom form definitions can be copied from one dashboard dataset to another, and shared between individuals, simply by copying the contents of this cms directory. In particular, if a process mentor has created forms for use by the organization, they can give those form definitions to a project team by copying the cms directory into that team's configuration data directory.

Finally, it is important to realize that the forms you create using this tool are specific to a particular metrics collection framework. If you create more than one custom metrics collection framework, it will be necessary to create a plan summary form for each one.

1.2.3. Plan Team Dashboard Deployments (Process Mentor / Coach)

The Team Dashboard uses a peer-to-peer approach for team and personal planning:

A Team Dashboard can roll up data from many individuals to display project reports, and an individual can be a member of many projects (including projects from different Team Dashboards).

Team projects are created within a Team Dashboard. A particular Team Dashboard can own any number of related projects. The Team Dashboard can generate reports of rolled-up data; either from a single project or from several related projects that it owns.

Separate Team Dashboards should be created for each logical grouping of projects that are part of some encompassing real-world effort. An organization can have as many Team Dashboards as they like.

The coaches and process mentors in the organization should work with new teams to decide if their projects should be added to an existing Team Dashboard, or if creating a new Team Dashboard is more appropriate.

The general steps for creating a new, distinct Team Dashboard are:

  1. Configure a data storage area for the new Team Dashboard.
  2. Run the installer to create a Team Dashboard application shortcut pointing to the new storage area. Rename the shortcut so it has a descriptive name.
  3. Open the new Team Dashboard and assign it a distinct, descriptive name by choosing "Tools → Preferences" and editing the window title.

1.3. Preparing for a Team Project Launch

When you begin a new team project, it is necessary to create and configure a new project in the Team Process Dashboard.

Although this process is normally simple, some teams may find that additional steps are required - especially for their very first team project. In particular, you may need to work with your local IT support staff to resolve organization-specific technical issues.

The team launch is an extremely intensive planning session - you don't have time to be distracted by technical issues. So it is strongly recommended that you make the preparations described in the topics below before your project launch begins. You can perform these steps as far in advance as you like.

1.3.1. Setup Team Dashboard Data Storage (Team Leader)

The Team Dashboard facilitates communication and collaboration between the members of a team project.

To support collaboration, the Team Dashboard needs a data storage area that all team members can access. This storage area will hold important team planning information, such as the list of all the project iterations the team has performed, the work breakdown structures for each, and exported snapshots of individual data, which the Team Dashboard will use to compute team roll-ups.

The Team Dashboard supports three different data storage approaches, as shown below. A coach or team leader will need to select and configure one of these approaches before team planning can begin:

  Network
Directory
Cloud
Storage
Enterprise
Server
Ease of setup and ongoing use Hard Moderate Easy
Access team reports from multiple computers  
Team data backed up automatically ?
Fast access to team data
Built-in data sharing controls
Automatic software upgrades
Time machine for historical data

1.3.1.1. Using a Network Directory for Team Data

Important Note: In the past, Team Dashboard users were instructed to create a shared network directory (described below) for team data storage. But in the current version of the dashboard, the best practices are now to use cloud storage or the Process Dashboard Enterprise Server. Network directories are still allowed to support teams who have been using the dashboard for years; but new teams should consider the other options instead. Migration support is also available for teams who wish to move away from network directories; see the cloud and server topics for more information.

Network directories are not the preferred location for team data storage. Here are some of the tradeoffs of this approach:

PRO: This approach is based on simple file-sharing services that have been around for decades. This makes it an option in nearly every environment, including air-gapped networks where other approaches would be impossible.
CON: Network file servers are a 1990's style technology that many IT departments are reluctant to support. With the modern preference toward zero-trust architectures, many organizations are eliminating their network file servers completely.
CON: Project data can only be accessed data when your computer is connected to the same network as the network file server, either directly or through a VPN. When a team is comprised of members in multiple locations, there may not be a network file server that all team members can access. And even when a particular server is reachable by the entire team, some individuals may encounter problems stemming from network latency or poor connectivity.
CON: File sharing protocols often have very slow performance - especially over a VPN. If your network is slow, it can take an exceptionally long time for the team dashboard to open or shut down. If your network is unreliable, it may result in data loss if the network becomes unavailable when an individual needs to save changes.
CON: The network folder must be mapped/mounted on all the computers you use. These connections can time out and may need to be reestablished manually (especially after changes in network connectivity).
CON: File permissions can be tricky to configure. If file permissions are incorrect, or if permission inheritance is not configured properly, team members may see read-only error message in the dashboard or WBS Editor.
CON: It can be a challenge to manage filesystem permissions based on changing team membership. Mistakes in the configuration of permission inheritance can sometimes go undetected and cause problems later.
CON: When teams are using a mix of Windows, Mac, Unix, and/or Linux, individuals may encounter hard-to-overcome problems stemming from the operating systems' differing support for file-sharing protocols. (This can manifest itself as a startup error stating that the dashboard or WBS was unable to lock files for writing.)
CON: Finding an appropriate server, creating a new team directory, and properly adjusting the permissions can take time. If a team forgets to perform these steps in advance, their initial project launch may be needlessly delayed while the entire team waits for these tasks to finish.
CON: In a large organization with a sizeable process improvement initiative, many teams may be using the Process Dashboard. It can be labor-intensive to create network directories for each team and help them to overcome the problems listed above. Even worse, the organization's valuable process improvement data is then scattered across an unknown number of network locations. This makes it harder for coaches to work with multiple teams; makes it challenging to ensure that proper backups are taking place; and makes it difficult to perform any sort of organization-wide data analysis.
1.3.1.1.1. Network Directory Team Dashboard Creation

If other options are not available, teams can use a shared network directory for team data storage. The general setup steps are:

  1. Work with your information technology (IT) support staff to identify a network file server.
    • This server must be on a network that is reachable by all team members. For remote workers and geographically distributed teams, this may require use of a VPN.
    • Team data is valuable and difficult to replace, so backups are important. Work with the IT staff to make sure periodic backups are enabled for the server in question, and for the directory created in the next step.
  2. Create a new, empty directory on that file server. For this directory, it is critical to ensure that the following file permissions are in place:
    • All team members are able to read/write all files.
    • Permissions are set to "inherit" - so that when new files and subdirectories are created, all team members can read/write them as well.
    • Since the directory will typically hold personal data collected by individuals, you may wish to configure it with permissions that forbid file access by non-team members.
  3. Map or mount the network directory so it is visible to your local computer (for example, as a new lettered drive in Windows, or as a folder under Volumes in Mac OS X).
  4. When installing the Process Dashboard, choose the "Tools for Team Leaders" option. When the installer asks for the location of team configuration data, enter the path to this directory.
    • If the members of your team are predominately using the Microsoft Windows operating system, the use of a UNC path is strongly recommended for configuration purposes. That is, whenever the dashboard asks for the location of this directory, you are encouraged to enter the directory path as \\serverName\path\to\directory instead of T:\path\to\directory.
    • The installer will create a Team Dashboard shortcut icon. If you expect to access more than one Team Dashboard as part of your work, give that newly created icon a unique name.

There will be times in the future that you will need to recall the location of the team configuration directory (for example, if a new individual needs to install a Team Dashboard shortcut). If you forget this location, you can look it up by opening the Team Dashboard, choosing Help → About Process Dashboard, and clicking the Configuration tab. The first paragraph on the Configuration tab will provide the location of the team configuration directory.

 

1.3.1.2. Using Cloud Storage for Team Data

Many cloud storage providers - such as OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others - offer desktop sync clients that copy files from your computer to the cloud, and vice versa. The dashboard can use these cloud storage providers to support team collaboration. The tradeoffs of this approach are:

PRO: Cloud service providers offer secure, backed-up storage that is compatible with zero-trust architectures.
PRO: Team Dashboard performance is not significantly affected by the speed of your network. Startup and shutdown should be relatively fast, even over a slow VPN.
PRO: Existing team project data (from past and current projects) can be migrated into cloud storage (but cooperation from active team members will be required).
PRO: Team Dashboard setup steps are less complex/error-prone than the network fileserver approach, especially when team members are connecting from a mix of operating systems and/or diverse networks.
CON: Team Dashboard setup steps are still more complex than the Enterprise Server, and action is required from every team member. If a team forgets to perform these steps in advance, their initial project launch may be needlessly delayed while the entire team waits for these tasks to finish.
CON: All team members must be proactive about running their cloud sync client and making sure it remains active. If file synchronization stops on a team member's computer for a longer period of time, their data will become out of sync with the rest of the team. This can lead to out-of-date info in team reports, and WBS edit conflicts when the individual finally comes back online.
CON: The dashboard cannot force the sync client to immediately publish or retrieve files. This means a Save or Export operation won't be fully finished until the sync client gets around to publishing the new files. Similarly, Refresh, Sync, and Import operations won't truly retrieve the latest data unless the sync client has copied that data from the cloud first. If your sync client operates quickly, these differences may not be noticeable. But if the sync client has a longer lag time, these discrepancies may confuse individuals who are trying to collaborate in real-time, or frustrate individuals who publish data and hope to see changes immediately.
1.3.1.2.1. Cloud Storage Team Dashboard Creation

To create a new Team Dashboard in cloud storage, follow these steps:

  1. Obtain an account with a cloud storage provider, if you don't already have one.
    • If you already have a Microsoft 365 or Google account, it comes with cloud storage included. If you don't have one, it's easy to create a free account.
    • All team members will need accounts and sync clients from the cloud storage provider you choose, so make sure to select a provider that will work for everyone. In particular, make sure your provider offers a desktop sync client for all of the operating systems (e.g., Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) that team members are using. (If you cannot find a provider that works for everyone, you may need to consider using the Enterprise Server instead.)
  2. Log in to the website for your cloud storage provider, and create a new, empty directory for team data.
    • Depending on the cloud storage provider, you may wish to create this directory within a team area, rather than your personal space. For example, this might be important to ensure the team data isn't lost if you leave the organization.
    • If you choose to create the directory in a shared team space, create a "shortcut" or "link" to include it in your personal drive as well. See the section below for more information on this step.
  3. Download and install the desktop sync client offered by your cloud storage provider. Configure the sync client to start automatically each time you log in to your computer.
  4. Find the dedicated folder on your computer that your sync client is managing. (This folder typically has a name like "OneDrive," "My Drive," etc.)
  5. Look underneath that managed folder to find the locally synced copy of the team data directory you created earlier. If you can't find it, make sure your sync client has copied all files down from the cloud.
  6. Run the installer for Process Dashboard 2.7 or higher, and choose the "Tools for Team Leaders" option. When the installer asks for the location of team configuration data, enter the path to the team directory you found in the previous step.
  7. The installer will create a Team Dashboard icon. Use that icon to launch the Team Dashboard. On initial startup, the Team Dashboard will ask if the directory is using cloud storage; click Yes.
    • If you do not see this prompt from the Team Dashboard, follow the steps below to register your cloud storage sync directory. Then restart the Team Dashboard, and watch for the cloud storage prompt during startup.
  8. Ensure your sync client is running, and wait for it to publish the team data directory to the cloud.
  9. Log in to the website for your cloud storage provider, and share this team data folder with the team members, leaders, and coaches who will be collaborating within this Team Dashboard.
1.3.1.2.2. Cloud Storage Team Member Setup

To collaborate with the team, all team members and coaches will need to take the following steps:

  1. Upgrade to Process Dashboard 2.7 or higher.
  2. Obtain an account with the cloud storage provider that is being used to host the Team Dashboard.
  3. Download and install the desktop sync client offered by this cloud storage provider. Configure the sync client to start automatically each time you log in to your computer.
  4. Log in to the website for your cloud storage provider, and look in the "Shared with me" area to find the team data directory. If you cannot find it, contact your team leader and make sure they have shared the team data directory with you.
  5. Add this shared team data directory to your personal drive via a "shortcut" or "link." (This step lets your sync client know the directory should by synchronized down to your local computer.) Exact instructions vary by cloud service; here are some examples:
    • OneDrive: Log into OneDrive in your web browser, and find the team data folder in the "Shared" list. Right-click on the folder and choose "Add shortcut to My files" from the popup menu. (More details here.)
    • Google Drive: Log into Google Drive in your web browser, and find the team data folder in the "Shared with me" list. Right-click on the folder and choose "Add shortcut to Drive" from the popup menu. (More details here.)
    • Dropbox: Log into Dropbox in your web browser, and find the team data folder in the "Shared" list. Depending on settings, the folder may have been added to your Dropbox account automatically; if not, hover over the folder, then click the "Add to Dropbox" button that appears. (More details here.)
  6. The previous step will add the team data shortcut to your drive at the top level. But you can move the shortcut elsewhere in your drive if you prefer to keep your top-level directory organized.
1.3.1.2.3. Cloud Storage Team Dashboard Sharing

The Team Dashboard reports are useful to many people, including team leaders, coaches, and planning/quality managers. Other people can create a Team Dashboard shortcut on their computer by following these steps:

  1. Perform the team member setup steps listed above.
  2. Make sure your sync client is running and all synced files are up-to-date. Find the location on your hard drive where the team data directory has been copied down from the cloud.
  3. Run the installer for Process Dashboard 2.7 or higher, and choose the "Tools for Team Leaders" option. When the installer asks for the location of team configuration data, enter the path to the directory you found in the previous step.
  4. The installer will create a Team Dashboard shortcut icon. If you expect to access more than one Team Dashboard as part of your work, give that newly created icon a unique name.
1.3.1.2.4. Migrating Existing Team Data to Cloud Storage

Historical data is extremely valuable for team planning, tracking, and postmortem analysis. If you've already been using the Team Dashboard, it's possible to migrate your existing data into cloud storage. The general steps for migration are:

  1. Make sure all team leaders and active team members have:
    • Upgraded to Process Dashboard 2.7 or higher.
    • Obtained an account with your selected cloud storage provider.
    • Installed the desktop sync client on their computer, and configured it to start automatically when they log in.
  2. Log in to the website for your cloud storage provider, and create a new, empty directory for team data, following the general guidance above.
  3. In the website for your cloud storage provider, share this team data folder with the team members, leaders, and coaches who will be collaborating within this Team Dashboard.
  4. Instruct team members to perform all of the team member setup steps above. Give them time and assistance to finish.
  5. Choose a non-project-critical time to perform the following steps, in case any team members require assistance after the migration.
  6. Contact team members and advise them to close any open WBS Editor windows until migration is complete.
  7. Install the desktop sync client on a computer where the Team Dashboard is already installed. Wait for the sync client to copy all files from the cloud, including the new empty team data directory you created. Find the locally synced copy of this team data directory on your computer.
  8. Open the Team Dashboard. Choose "Tools → Migrate Data to Cloud Storage," then follow the prompts from the migration wizard.
    • When it asks for the new location of team data, enter the path to the locally synced copy of the team data directory.
    • If the wizard complains that the new location does not appear to be in cloud storage, follow the steps below to register your top-level cloud storage sync directory. Then try the migration operation again.
  9. Ensure your sync client is running, and wait for it to publish the new team data directory to the cloud.
  10. If team members have completed the steps above, their personal dashboards will detect the migration within ten minutes, and begin using the new cloud storage directory automatically.
    • Individuals can verify connectivity by performing a "Sync to WBS" and an "Export My Data Now" operation. They can also open the "Project Parameters and Settings" page and verify the value in the "Team Project Network Directory" field.
    • In the Team Dashboard, you can open "Team Project Tools → Show Status of Team Member Metrics" and watch to see that individuals are able to successfully export data after the migration.
    • If any team member encounters problems, it's likely they missed one of the setup steps. Work with them to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.
1.3.1.2.5. Manual Registration of Less Common Cloud Storage Providers

The dashboard can automatically recognize sync folders for many common cloud storage providers. But if you're using a less-well-known provider or a home-grown solution, you may need to tell the dashboard where the synced files are stored on your computer:

  1. Open the dashboard and choose "Preferences" from the "Tools" menu.
  2. In the Preferences dialog, choose "Shared Folders."
  3. If the table already contains an entry for the directory where your cloud sync client stores synced files, no changes are needed. Otherwise, click the Add button to register a new shared folder.
  4. Give the entry a short user-friendly key that describes the cloud storage service.
    • As an example, the standard providers use keys like "OneDrive" or "Dropbox".
    • To streamline collaboration, everyone on your team should use the same key to describe this cloud storage service.
  5. For the shared folder location, choose the top-level folder your sync client is managing. Then click OK.

The top-level folder you chose will now be recognized as a folder that is being synced/shared across devices. To streamline team collaboration, other team members are encouraged to perform this extra configuration step as well. (This is not strictly required, but it will make it easier for them to join team projects.)

Note: while the instructions in this help topic consistently refer to cloud storage, the instructions apply equally well to any mechanism that can automatically synchronize files between a group of computers. Older-style solutions like rsync and Offline Folders are possible examples. You'll need to follow the steps in this section to flag the folder as "shared," and you'll need to ensure synchronization happens frequently to avoid data consistency issues.

 

1.3.1.3. Using Process Dashboard Enterprise Server for Team Data

The Process Dashboard Enterprise Server was purpose-designed to provide specialized storage for team and personal data. It is optimized for fast, reliable access, and eliminates many of the challenges associated with other storage options. To use the Enterprise Server for an existing Team Dashboard, see the migration instructions below. The Enterprise Server provides a number of benefits:

PRO: Creation of new team and personal dashboards is fast and easy, and team project creation/joining operations are more automated. This saves time and eliminates work for coaches as they onboard new teams, allowing them to focus on value-added work.
PRO: You can access team data from any number of different computers (including a mix of Windows / Mac OS X / Linux computers) and diverse networks (including geographically distributed teams and remote workers using a VPN).
PRO: Dashboard operations are not affected by the speed of your network. Startup and shutdown times remain consistent, even over a slow VPN.
PRO: When you need to let a coach or team leader access team reports, you can easily grant them permissions. This can be done by opening the Team Dashboard and choosing "Tools → Edit Users," or by logging in to the Enterprise Server, clicking the "Details" link for a dataset, then clicking "Edit Permissions" on the dataset details page.
PRO: Local and remote coaches can easily access live, up-to-date team data. Live access makes it possible to view the WBS change history, leave notes for the team about data problems, correct minor data problems, and adjust labels for special analyses.
PRO: Team data privacy is protected automatically, without the need to manually configure filesystem permissions, and without the ongoing headache of reconfiguring permissions when team membership changes.
PRO: Team data is safely backed up to the server at all times, and won't be lost if your hard drive crashes.
PRO: Existing team project data (from past and current projects) can be easily migrated into the server with no team downtime.
PRO: You don't need to manually upgrade the Dashboard when new versions of the software become available. The server administrator can push software upgrades automatically.
PRO: A "time machine" feature makes it possible to view reports, charts, and data as they appeared at any point in the past. This can assist with postmortem analysis, data recovery, and more. You can view historical reports by logging in to the Enterprise Server, clicking the "Details" link for a dataset, then clicking the historical data link in the "Actions" section of the dataset details page.
PRO: It is possible to share process definitions, workflows, custom WBS columns and tabs, proxy estimation tables, defect type standards, and custom reports across the entire organization. With the data warehouse option, organization-wide cross-team data analyses become possible.

For more information on the server, visit https://www.processdash.com/pdes

1.3.1.3.1. Enterprise Server Team Dashboard Creation

The general steps for creating a new Team Dashboard on the Enterprise Server are:

  1. Obtain an account on a Process Dashboard Enterprise Server.
    • If many people in your organization use the Process Dashboard, your organization can purchase a license to run the server in-house.
    • For personal use, or use by a small team, monthly subscriptions are available.
  2. Log in to the Enterprise Server in your web browser. After successfully logging in, click "Create New Dataset" in the navigation menu on the left side of the page.
    • If you have not been granted access to this option, contact the server administrator to create the team dashboard dataset for you.
    • Otherwise, enter a unique name for the new team dashboard and click Save.
  3. Return to the "My Datasets" page, and click the link to the team dashboard you just created. This will download a small file with instructions to launch the team dashboard.
    • Some web browsers will open this file automatically; if your browser does not, double-click the file to open it manually. Your server-based team dashboard will open.
    • If your computer doesn't know how to open the file, click the link at the bottom of the "My Datasets" page to download and install the Process Dashboard Launcher software. (The launcher installer will also create an application icon that you can click to open the Team Dashboard directly.)
    • You can open this server-based Team Dashboard from as many other computers as you like; just follow the instructions in this step from another computer.
1.3.1.3.2. Migrating Existing Team Data into the Enterprise Server

Historical data is extremely valuable for team planning, tracking, and postmortem analysis. If you've already been using the Team Dashboard, it's easy to migrate your existing data into the Enterprise Server. The general steps for migration are:

  1. Obtain an account on a Process Dashboard Enterprise Server as described above.
  2. Obtain Enterprise Server accounts for all individuals who are active team members, leaders, or coaches of the projects in the Team Dashboard you wish to migrate. Ask them to log in to the server at least once to establish their password.
  3. Go to a computer that has an existing icon for the Team Dashboard you wish to migrate. If the Team Dashboard is running, close it.
  4. Download the Enterprise Server migration tool and install it by opening/double-clicking the downloaded file.
  5. Open the Team Dashboard. Then choose "Tools → Migrate Data to Server" and follow the prompts.
  6. The migration wizard will import project data into the server, followed by core configuration data.

This migration operation is mostly seamless to end users:

Typically, the only change people may notice is a new username/password prompt from the dashboard and the WBS Editor. Completing Step 2 above will ensure they know the right credentials to use at that prompt.

 

1.3.2. Install Process Dashboard

If your team is using the Process Dashboard Enterprise Server, individuals will not need to follow the steps below. Instead, they can install the Process Dashboard Launcher.

If you have installed the dashboard in the past, you do not need to uninstall. Just run the new installer and choose the default values for all prompts, and it will upgrade you to the latest version.

To install or upgrade the Process Dashboard, follow the steps described below:

1.3.2.1. Installing on Windows

  1. To begin the installation process:
     
    • If you downloaded an EXE file for installing the dashboard, double-click on that file.
    • If you have a thumb drive containing the software, insert it into your computer. The installation process may start automatically. If it does not start automatically, double-click the setup.exe file on the thumb drive.
    • If you have a ZIP file containing the software, unzip it and double-click the extracted file setup.exe.
       
  2. The Process Dashboard requires Java to run. If Java has not already been installed on your computer, the EXE installer will display an error message; in this case, visit https://processdash.com/java to download Java. (The thumb drive and ZIP packages include a Java installer, and will launch it automatically if needed.) When the Java installer runs, you can choose the default values for each prompt.
     
  3. The Process Dashboard installer will open:

  4. You may accept the default values for each prompt. When you reach the page asking which packs you wish to install, team leaders and process mentors should select the "Tools for Team Leaders" option. Individual team members do not need to select this option unless they need a Team Dashboard shortcut icon.

  5. The installer will allow you to select a directory where personal metrics data will be stored. You may accept the default value. Note: if you are upgrading the dashboard from an earlier version, and you previously chose to place your personal data in some other location, make certain that location is correctly displayed in this field. If the directory is incorrect and you neglect to edit it, you can run the installer a second time to set the data location correctly.
     
  6. Team leaders and process mentors will be prompted to identify a directory where team configuration information will be stored. Enter the path to the team data directory, which the team leader created earlier. (If your team is using a network directory for team data, you may need to map a network drive to access this folder. If your team is using cloud storage for team data, you may need to perform extra setup steps to sync this directory to your computer.)

  7. At the end of the installation, you will be given the opportunity to create shortcuts for starting the Process Dashboard. Choose the appropriate options and click Next.

    This will create application shortcuts for your use:
    • A Process Dashboard shortcut will always be created, which allows you to manage your own personal data. (Even team leaders and process mentors will typically have some project tasks assigned to them; they should use this personal dataset to perform that work.)
    • Team leaders and process mentors will also receive a Team Dashboard shortcut, which allows you to manage rolled-up team data. Clicking this shortcut will launch a team dataset.
  8. If you are a coach or process mentor who needs to access the dashboard for several different teams, just rename your Team Dashboard shortcut to something unique (such as "ABC Team Dashboard"). Then run the installer again, choose the Tools for Team Leaders option, and enter the team data directory for the next team when prompted. In the final step, the installer will create a shortcut called "Team Dashboard" for this second team, which you can rename to something unique and descriptive (such as "XYZ Team Dashboard"). You can repeat this process for as many teams as needed.

1.3.2.2. Installing on Mac OS X

Installing the Process Dashboard on Mac OS X requires a slightly different process.

  1. To begin the installation process:
     
    • If you downloaded an JAR file for installing the dashboard, double-click on that file.
    • If you have a thumb drive or ZIP file containing the software, find the file inside called pdash-install-*-#_#_#.jar. It will be in a data subdirectory, and the file will contain an actual version number rather than #_#_#). Double-click on that file.
       
  2. Follow the installer directions as described in the section above.
     
  3. An icon will be created in the Applications folder for the Process Dashboard. (If you chose to install the Tools for Team Leaders option, a Team Dashboard shortcut will be created as well.)

1.3.2.3. Installing on Unix/Linux

Installing the Process Dashboard on Unix requires a few additional steps.

  1. Make certain Java is installed on your computer, by typing "which java" at a shell prompt. If Java is not installed, you can download it from https://processdash.com/java or use an appropriate package manager.
     
  2. Obtain the JAR file for installing the Process Dashboard. (If you have a thumb drive or ZIP file containing the software, find the file inside called pdash-install-*-#_#_#.jar. It will be in a data subdirectory, and the file will contain an actual version number rather than #_#_#). At a shell prompt, change to the directory containing that file, and type:
    java -jar pdash-install-*.jar
  3. The Process Dashboard installer will appear.
     
  4. Follow the installer directions as described in the section above.
     
  5. The Process Dashboard installer will attempt to create shortcuts that you can use to launch the application. However, due to the variety of window managers on Unix platforms, the installer may not always be able to create shortcuts:
     
    • If it cannot create shortcuts, the installer will create draft shell scripts that you may use to launch the Process Dashboard. In the directory you designated as your data directory (defaults to ~/.pspdata), you will find the file run-dash.sh. In the directory you designated as your team configuration directory, you will also find a file called run-dash.sh. (These launch two different dashboard datasets; see the section above for an explanation of the two datasets.) Review the contents of these scripts; in particular, you may wish to uncomment and edit the line that adds java to the executable path. For convenience, you may wish to manually create icons/shortcuts for launching the dashboard.

1.3.2.4. Installing Launcher for Enterprise Server

If your team is using the Process Dashboard Enterprise Server, individuals do not need to perform any complex installation steps, and do not need to manually upgrade when new versions of the software become available. Instead, they can install the Process Dashboard Launcher by taking these steps:

  1. Log in to the Enterprise Server. At the bottom of the "My Datasets" page, click the link for the Process Dashboard Launcher software.
     
  2. Download and run the installer for your operating system.
     
  3. The installer will create a "Process Dashboard Launcher" icon for you. You can run that application for quick access to all of the team and personal dashboards that appear in your "My Datasets" view.
     
  4. In addition, you can log in to the Enterprise Server in your web browser and click links to launch specific datasets. Those will download small files with the pdlnk or tdlnk extension. You can open those files immediately, or save them on your desktop as a direct shortcut to the given dataset.
 

1.3.3. Create a Team Project (Team Leader)

Creating a team project is simple. Just follow these steps:

  1. Start the Team Dashboard using the appropriately named shortcut on the team leader's computer. The Team Dashboard will open.
  2. In the Team Dashboard window, click the File menu and choose "New Project."
  3. The Team Project Setup Wizard will appear in your web browser to walk you through the steps involved in creating a team project. Read each page carefully and supply the information requested. One page of the wizard will ask whether you wish to create a team project or a master project; choose the Team Project option.
  4. When the wizard finishes, you can close the browser window.

1.3.4. Invite Team Members to Join Team Project (Team Leader)

The dashboard takes a wholistic view of team and personal data. It assumes that teams and individuals will participate in many projects, and that these many-to-many relationships will change over time. So to establish these relationships, each team member must "join" the team project.

If team members are storing their personal dashboards in the Enterprise Server, joining invitations will be sent automatically. Otherwise, it will be necessary to follow the instructions below.

After creating a team project, the team leader should invite all team members to join the new project. For teams using the dashboard for the first time, it is wise to perform this step before the project launch. Joining the project helps to ensure that everyone has successfully installed the software, and that no network communication problems exist. Performing this step before the launch gives you time to work through any problems that might arise.

Before following the instructions below, you must have already (a) installed the Team Dashboard, and (b) created a team project.

  1. If the Team Dashboard is not already running, start it using the appropriately named shortcut on the team leader's computer.
  2. In the Team Dashboard window, select the appropriate team project from the tree on the left. Then choose "Edit Team Member List" from the pane on the right.
  3. Fill in the first two columns of the team member list, to list the names and initials of people on the team. (If you are performing these steps before the project launch, you can leave the remaining columns to be completed later.) Save the changes.
  4. Back in the Team Dashboard window, select the "Team Project Tools" option from the list that appears on the right.

  5. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and find the section called "Joining Team Members to the Project." Use one of the listed approaches to invite team members to join.

    If you decide to use the "hyperlink" joining approach, leave the Team Dashboard program running while team members join. The hyperlink approach may not work in some organizations, if network configuration or firewalls block peer-to-peer communications. If your team members receive a "Server Not Found" or similar error, use the "invitation file" approach instead.
  6. As the team leader, you could very possibly perform some tasks in support of project work. If so, you too should personally follow the steps to join the project. To do this, complete the following:
    • Launch your personal Process Dashboard dataset and leave it running
    • Point your Web browser at the same hyperlink (described above) that your team members are using to join the project.

1.3.5. Join Team Project (Team Members)

As an individual, your personal historical data is very useful for planning, tracking, and personal process improvement. So the dashboard strives to let you keep all of your personal historical data in one place. You can use a single Process Dashboard dataset to collect all of your personal data, even if you move from team to team and work on many different projects over time. Because of this flexibility, you must tell the dashboard when you are joining a new team project.

Before you can join the project, you must have successfully installed the Process Dashboard. Start the Process Dashboard and leave it running.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, review and complete the cloud storage team member setup steps.

Then start the joining process by following one of these steps:

The Team Project Setup Wizard will be displayed in your web browser.

Click "Next," and the Team Project Setup Wizard will display a form to collect information about the project. Fields with a white background need your attention, but you can accept the default values that appear in the gray fields. As you click on each field, explanations will appear to help you understand what you should enter.

One of the fields will ask you for your initials. The value you enter here should match the initials that are entered for you in this project's team member list, so your team leader may tell you which initials you should use. As you type, autocompletion will show you matches from the current team list; you can select your name from those autocompletion options if you see it. If you enter the wrong initials during this step, do not worry; you can easily fix them later by opening the Project Parameters and Settings page for this team project.

When the wizard finishes, you can close the browser window.

1.3.6. Conditional: Add Member Schedules to Team Schedule (Team Leader)

This step will normally be unnecessary, because member schedules are usually added to the team schedule automatically as they join the project. Certain unusual circumstances (for example, an individual joining a project twice, or deleting and manually recreating their personal EV schedule) may interfere with this automatic operation. When a problem occurs, an individual's personal schedule may not appear in the team rollup, and you may see "Task List Missing" errors. You can resolve such problems by following these steps:

  1. Make certain that the individual has successfully exported their project data. Ask the individual what name they gave their earned value schedule. (This is normally the same as the name of the project, but individuals sometimes choose a different name.)
  2. Open the Team Dashboard if it is not already running. Import all team data.
  3. In the Team Dashboard window, choose Task and Schedule from the File menu. In the window that appears, select the earned value schedule corresponding to your team project, and click Open.

  4. In the window that appears, check to see if there is an erroneous entry for this individual (i.e., an entry highlighted in red with a "task list missing" error). If so, highlight the erroneous entry, and click the Remove Schedule button.
  5. Next, click the Add Schedule button. An Add Schedule dialog window will appear.

  6. Look for an entry that starts with the name the individual gave their earned value schedule, and ends with their name in parentheses. Select that entry and click OK. If you do not see an appropriate entry, ensure that the individual has successfully exported their data, then import all team data and try again.
  7. After successfully adding the individual's schedule to the team schedule, click Save to save the team schedule. You can then click the Close button to close the team schedule window.

1.3.7. Create or Obtain Forms and Reports for Project Use

The Team Project Plan Summary forms in the Process Dashboard are completely customizable. For more information about this feature, see the Creating / Customizing Process Forms and Reports help topic.

During your launch (in particular, during Meetings 5 and 6), you will need access to certain metrics data. As a result, you should take a moment before the project launch begins to open your team project plan summary, and ensure that it meets your planning needs. If the metrics you need are not present, you should take one of the following actions:

1.3.8. Optional: Create Master Project (Program Leader)

In the Process Dashboard, a Team Project allows data to be rolled up data from several individuals to the team level. For larger projects, it may also be necessary to roll up data from several team projects to the program level. Master Projects are designed to meet this need.

To create a new master project, follow these steps:

  1. Start the Team Dashboard using the appropriately named shortcut on the team leader's computer. The Team Dashboard will start.
  2. In the Team Dashboard window, click the File menu and choose "New Project."
  3. The Team Project Setup Wizard will appear in your web browser to walk you through the steps involved in creating a master project. Read each page carefully and supply the information requested. One page of the wizard will ask whether you wish to create a team project or a master project; choose the Master Project option.
  4. When the wizard finishes, you can close the browser window.

1.3.9. Add Team Projects to Master Project (Program Leader)

After you create the master project, you must tell the dashboard which team projects it contains. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. If the Team Dashboard is not already running, start it using the appropriately named shortcut on the team leader's computer.
  2. In the Team Dashboard window, select the master project from the tree on the left.

  3. Select Edit List of Subprojects from the list on the right. A web page will be displayed, allowing you to add subprojects to the master project.

In the current version of the dashboard, note that the following limitations apply:

1.3.10. Define Top-Down Tasks for Master Project (Program Leader)

In any project of significant size, it is important for plans to be well-organized. If this is true for a team project, it is especially true for a master project.

Projects typically use a hierarchical work breakdown structure to describe groupings of related work. At the master project level, such a hierarchy should describe the major systems and subsystems that make up the master project. Special attention should be given to hierarchical systems and subsystems that are common across the team projects.

If there are certain project components and/or tasks that are common across the subprojects of a master project, you can define these tasks in the master project. Defining these common items can help earned value data and metrics data to roll up from subprojects to the master project in a more meaningful way. To define these common systems, subsystems, and tasks, follow the steps below:

  1. If the Team Dashboard is not already running, start it using the appropriately named shortcut on the team leader's computer.
  2. In the Team Dashboard window, select the appropriate master project from the tree on the left.

  3. Next, select Top-Down Work Breakdown Structure from the list on the right.

This will open a Work Breakdown Structure Editor where you can enter and edit components that are common to all of the team projects in the master project. (For more information about editing this work breakdown structure, see the Editing the Work Breakdown Structure help topic.)


2. Using the Dashboard During a Team Project Launch

You will make extensive use of the Team Dashboard during the project launch. Thus, if the Team Dashboard is not already running, you should start it using the appropriately named shortcut on the team leader's computer.

When you select the team project from the tree on the left, the pane on the right will display a list of various tools and reports. You will use these tools extensively during the launch.

If you prefer, you can also open these tools from a web browser; just choose Team Project Tools from the list described above. The Team Project Tools page will open in your Web browser.

2.1. Enter List of Team Members

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 2)

The dashboard needs a list of project team members to facilitate planning later in the launch. If you wish, you may enter this data before the launch begins; otherwise, you can enter this information during the launch. The list of team members can be edited at any time.

In the Team Dashboard, select the appropriate team project from the tree on the left, then choose the Edit Team Member List option from the list on the right.

The Team List Editor will appear.

The left half of the window displays information about each team member, while the right half of the window displays the calendar of available time per person. In the table heading for the calendar, the first date is a hyperlink; you can click that link to choose the day of the week when the schedule should start. The Weekly Earned Value report will be most useful if you start the schedule on the day of the week when the team holds their weekly meeting.

Using one line per team member, enter the following required information:

If you need to delete an entry from the list, simply delete the name and initials for that row. When you save and reopen the team list, that row will be automatically removed.

You can change the order of the individuals in the team member list by highlighting a row, then dragging it up or down. In addition, if your team is beginning a new project or new iteration, you can use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to copy highlighted team member rows from one Team Member list window to another.

Click the Save button when you are finished editing the list of team members.

 

2.2. Plan Overall Project Strategy

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 3)

One of the first tasks in your project launch will be to create your overall project strategy. The dashboard provides powerful tools in support of this task.

Your project strategy begins with a conceptual design. To promote the free flow of ideas, it is often a good idea to use a whiteboard, easel, and other traditional meeting aids to capture the team's ideas.

As the conceptual design begins to take shape, you will begin to identify the main components / features of the product to be produced, or the main categories of work to be performed. These items will ultimately become the top-level entries in your project WBS. While the team continues to capture these on a whiteboard, it is helpful to have one person copy these into the dashboard's Work Breakdown Structure Editor in real-time.

To do this, select the team project from the tree on the left side of the Team Dashboard window, then choose "Work Breakdown Structure Editor" from the list on the right.

The Work Breakdown Structure Editor will open.

The Work Breakdown Structure Editor displays your hierarchical work breakdown structure (WBS) on the left. Tabs on the right hand side of the screen provide access to various collections of project planning metrics. During the conceptual design process, you will primarily use the hierarchical list on the left-hand side. If you need more space to view this hierarchical list, simply drag the splitter bar to the right.

The WBS is displayed in outline format. To create a new item in the WBS, just press Enter or Insert. Click on the name of an item to edit it. To arrange items hierarchically, press Tab or Shift-Tab to change their indentation within the outline. You will find many of these tasks repeated on the toolbar and the Edit menu. For more in-depth information, see the Editing the Work Breakdown Structure help topic.

If this team project is a member of a master project, the master project leader may have outlined a set of high-level components that you should use as the basis for your conceptual design. As you enter your conceptual design into the WBS, you should align the tasks you create underneath the appropriate high-level components from the master project whenever it makes sense to do so.

Your conceptual design may include various components and documents. You can alter the type of a WBS item by clicking the node to the left of its name; a menu will appear that you can use to change the item type. If you're uncertain, you can reuse the generic Component type for most items in your conceptual design.

To complete the conceptual design, the team may wish to produce rough size estimates for each item in the WBS. You can enter this data by selecting the "Planned Size" tab on the right-hand side of the screen.

The initial list of size columns may differ from the ones in the image below, based on the metrics framework that was used to create the project. For newer team projects (created using Process Dashboard 2.6.3 or higher), you can edit the list of size metrics by choosing "Workflows → Edit Size Metrics."

For newer team projects (created using Process Dashboard 2.6 or higher), you can enter values in more than one size column for a given item. For example, if you plan to produce a requirements and design document as part of your work for a software component, you could enter planned sizes for the component in all of those columns. You can also enter separate estimates in a single column on a parent and its children. For example, you might plan to create design documents at both the system and the subcomponent level.

If your team project was created with an older version of the dashboard, you'll see separate tabs for "Size" and "Size Accounting." Older projects place additional constraints on where planned sizes can be entered. These constraints will be relaxed when you relaunch your project.

With rough size estimates in place, your team is ready to determine its overall project development strategy. One component of this strategy will be the list of items you wish to include in the upcoming project phase or cycle. If your plan includes large software components that will be developed over multiple iterations, you may wish to hierarchically subdivide them to mirror this decision.

Of course, it is also important to produce a rough understanding of the amount of effort that the project will require. Your team may use a variety of planning techniques (such as fuzzy logic, wide-band delphi, or PROBE) to estimate the approximate amount of time each component will require. In accordance with TSP planning techniques, these should be "direct time" estimates, corresponding with the amount of direct time per week that each team member estimated that they would be able to spend on project work. As you produce these estimates, you can switch to the Task Time tab and enter them in the Time column.

These rough time estimates form the basis for the team's capacity planning. Stakeholders will be interested in knowing how long it will take to finish the project, and when various iterative deliverables might be ready. To see this information, click the Team menu and select the "Show Team Time Balancing Panel" option. Also, look on the Team menu and ensure that the box is checked to "Include Unassigned Effort in Balanced Team Calculation." With these settings in place, the black horizontal "Team" bar will show the date when the team might be able to complete all of the work for the entire project.

2.2.1. Documenting Ownership/Responsibilities

At this stage in the planning process, you may or may not care to think about the team members who will be responsible for each component. If not, you can hide the colored bars for each team member by clicking the icon to the left of the "Team (Balanced)" label.

If you do wish to capture preliminary ideas about the owner of each component, you can optionally enter initials in the "Assigned To" column. This can help to document responsibility, and also to indicate that a particular individual is likely to perform most of the work for that component. If other people will be collaborating, you can enter their initials as well, optionally followed by the rough estimate of the number of hours they might spend. For example, you could enter "aa, bb 10, cc 10" to indicate that the people with initials "bb" and "cc" will be performing about 10 hours each, and the person with initials "aa" will do the remaining work.

As you enter and edit these values in the "Assigned To" column, the colored bars for each team member will recalculate and show the date each individual might complete all of their assigned components. This can help you to begin thinking about how the team's capacity plan will translate to the individual level.

2.2.2. Using Proxies to Estimate Size and Time

As described above, teams can produce estimates manually and enter them directly on the Size and Task Time tabs. If desired, teams can also use a more advanced technique based on estimation proxies.

During high-level planning, it can often be difficult to visualize details like the number of LOC, pages, hours, etc. that will be required for a particular component. The team may have more success visualizing the work in terms of high-level concepts like "Change Requests," "User Stories," "Help Documents," etc. In the TSP parlance, these high-level concepts are called "proxies." The team can create and edit a list of proxy tables by choosing "Edit Proxy Estimation Tables" from the Workflow menu.

Each proxy table has a unique name, and is displayed with a table icon. You can create a new proxy table by highlighting the name of an existing table and pressing Enter or Insert. Within each table, rows are listed for relative sizes such as small, medium, and large. You can create new relative size rows by highlighting a row and pressing Enter or Insert, and you can delete unneeded rows by pressing the delete button on the toolbar.

For each relative size row, you can enter a size, rate, and/or time. All of these columns are optional. If the team is not worried about estimating size, they can create a proxy table that only uses the Time column. Similarly, the team can make use of the size column only, if they prefer to make time estimates using a different technique. Of course, it is possible to enter numbers in all three columns if desired.

When entering values in the Size column, the units (e.g. LOC, Text Pages, etc.) must be specified. For newer projects (created with Process Dashboard 2.6.3 or higher), you can enter any units you like and the corresponding size metric will be created automatically. (For older projects, the units must be chosen from the list of size metrics displayed on the Planned Size tab.)

Best practices for estimation often recommend the use of a logarithmic scale for the estimates in the relative size rows. Accordingly, the proxy editor will automatically fill in empty rows for you as soon as you enter one or more size or time estimates. For example:

There is not a Save button on the Proxy Tables Editor. Instead, tables are automatically saved when you save the main work breakdown structure. To save, switch back to the main Work Breakdown Structure Editor window and select Save from the File menu.

If you build proxy tables that are reusable across different projects or different teams, you can use the Import and Export buttons on the toolbar of the proxy editor window to copy tables between projects.

After creating these tables, the team can return to the Task Details tab on the main WBS Editor window. Select a proxy type and a relative size for a particular component, and the WBS Editor will retrieve the corresponding size and/or time estimates from your proxy table. This technique can help a team to very quickly produce estimates for a large number of components in the Work Breakdown Structure.

2.2.3. Size Metrics

Size estimation and measurement are valuable aspects of project planning and tracking. The WBS will provide an initial set of size metrics based on the metrics framework that was used to create the project. For newer team projects (created using Process Dashboard 2.6.3 or higher), you can customize the list of size metrics by choosing "Workflows → Edit Size Metrics."

Size metrics can be created, renamed, and deleted by clicking the corresponding buttons on the toolbar.

There is not a Save button on the Size Metrics Editor. Instead, customizations are automatically saved when you save the main work breakdown structure. To save, switch back to the main Work Breakdown Structure Editor window and select Save from the File menu.

2.2.4. Iterations and Milestones

Most teams will also need to plan the iterative development approach for the project. Many decisions factor into this iteration plan, including the prioritization of work and the relative amount of effort that can be allocated to each cycle. To explore these tradeofs, click the Milestones menu on the WBS Editor window, and select Edit Milestones.

You can enter milestones corresponding to cycles/iterations, to noteworthy schedule events, or to external commitments. Place the milestones in approximate chronological order. Each milestone should have a unique name. Commit dates are optional.

Back on the WBS Editor, choose the Task Details tab and select the most appropriate Milestone for each component. As you do, diamonds on the horizontal black "Team (Balanced)" bar will indicate the approximate dates when the team could finish all of the components allocated to a particular milestone. As you change the milestone assignments for various components, the diamonds will update dynamically to indicate the optimal date when each milestone could finish.

If your capacity planning needs are complex, you may benefit from the techniques decribed in the alternative plans help topic.

There is not a Save button on the Milestones Editor. Instead, milestones are automatically saved when you save the main work breakdown structure. To save, switch back to the main Work Breakdown Structure Editor window and select Save from the File menu.

2.3. Plan Project Development Process

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 3)

In the next step of the project launch process, the team typically formalizes the steps in their development process. To do this, you may draw upon existing organizational processes, or you may define new processes as a team during the launch. The team may create defined processes, or they may simply identify common, repeatable workflows. The Process Dashboard provides tools that assist with this task.

If your team is defining new processes from scratch, it is often a good idea to use a whiteboard, easel, and other traditional meeting aids to capture the team's ideas, as this helps to promote the free flow of ideas. When the team processes begin to solidify, it is helpful to have an individual enter these into the dashboard. (On the other hand, if your process definitions take a long time to solidify, it may be more helpful to wait until after the meeting is over to enter the process steps into the dashboard.)

Processes and workflows are entered into the Common Team Workflows Editor. From the Work Breakdown Structure Editor window, you can access the Common Team Workflows Editor by selecting the Workflow menu and choosing Edit Workflows.

Processes and workflows are once again displayed hierarchically and edited in an outline format. (For more in-depth information on editing this outline, see the Editing the Work Breakdown Structure help topic.) In this hierarchical outline, each item that is a direct child of the Common Workflows node represents a single process or workflow. These items are displayed with an etched rectangular icon (). You can designate a given node as a process or workflow by un-indenting it as far to the left as possible.

Define the steps in a process or workflow by creating items hierarchically underneath it. Underneath a process or workflow, you can define documents that will be created and tasks that will be performed. To define the type of each item you create, click on its icon to display a menu. When defining a high-maturity process, make certain to select the most appropriate process phase for each task you create.

You are not limited in the number of processes/workflows you can create. Each process/workflow, however, should be given a unique name.

The columns on the right are completely optional, but entering data can save you a great deal of time later.

The columns described above are used by most teams, so they are always visible. However, a number of optional/advanced columns are also available. To enable these optional columns, click the Add Column button on the toolbar (), and select from the following choices:

There is not a Save button on the Common Team Workflows Editor. Instead, workflow definitions are automatically saved when you save the main work breakdown structure. To save, switch back to the main Work Breakdown Structure Editor window and select Save from the File menu.

2.3.1. High-Maturity Personal Planning

As you define the steps in a workflow, two special task types are provided in support of high-maturity personal planning. These types are "PSP Task" and "High-Maturity Planning Task."

In either case, the responsible individual will be able to draw upon their personal historical data to refine their plan. This provides a bridge between team historical data and personal historical data:

This two-phased approach is an example of the "rolling wave" planning technique, which is considered a best-practice with the project management commmunity.

2.3.2. Reusing Workflows via Libraries

Two buttons on the toolbar provide the ability to import () and export () workflows. This makes it possible to share workflows between projects and between project teams. When you click one of these buttons, the workflow editor will ask you to identify the name of a workflow library file. You can export workflows to a new or existing library file, or import workflows from an existing file. After choosing a file, the Import/Export Team Workflows window will appear. This window shows the workflows from the current project in a table on the left, and the workflows from the library in a table on the right.

When exporting, you can select a workflow in the table on the left and click the Add button to export it to the library on the right. When importing, you can select a workflow in the library table on the right and click the Add button to import it to the project workflows on the left.

Workflows are identified by their names (for example, "Simple Process" in the image below). If you import or export a workflow which has the same name as an existing workflow in the destination table, the existing workflow will be overwritten. For example, in the image below, the user is importing workflows from an existing library. They have selected the "Simple Process" workflow in the library on the right. Since there is already a workflow by that name in the project workflow list on the left, the application has automatically highlighted it, and changed the text on the Add button to "Overwrite," indicating that if this workflow is imported it will overwrite the workflow that is highlighted on the left.

At times, you may wish to import all the workflows in a library, or export all of the workflows in your project. The Add All button will perform this task. Keep in mind that any existing workflows with the same names will be overwritten, as described in the paragraph above.

The changes you make in the Import/Export Team Workflows window will not be saved until you click the Import or Export button at the bottom of the window. (Only one of these buttons will appear, depending on whether you chose to import workflows or export workflows.) When you click the Export button, the changes you made to the workflow library will be saved to the named file. When you click the Import button, the changes you made to the project workflows will be applied to the contents of the Common Team Workflows Editor. When importing or exporting, if you make a mistake or change your mind, just click the Cancel button and no changes will be saved.

2.4. Plan Project Support Tasks

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 3)

In a TSP project launch, teams typically finish meeting No. 3 by developing a project support plan. This plan lists support tools and facilities that are needed but missing. As you create that plan, add tasks to your project WBS to obtain or develop each missing support item.

2.5. Develop Balanced Project Plan

(TSP Launch Meeting Nos. 4 and 6)

Different teams use different planning styles during their project launch. For example, some teams begin by creating an unbalanced top-down plan for the project. After this plan is segregated into individual plans, a second effort is initiated to reassign work so the individual plans will be balanced.

In contrast, the team support for the Process Dashboard makes it possible to perform these two tasks simultaneously. As a result, you may wish to consider merging TSP launch meeting No. 4 and meeting No. 6 into a single launch meeting.

The tasks below involve "fleshing out" the project and creating detailed plans for the next iteration. This effort is often ideally suited for simultaneous editing. Allowing all team members to work in parallel, refining their portions of the plan, is a perfect example of the high-maturity concept of self-directed teams, and is strongly considered a best practice.

2.5.1. Refining Project Components

The first step in creating a team plan is to refine the high-level components listed in the earlier team strategy meeting. This may involve hierarchically subdividing plan components targeted for the upcoming project phase or cycle. If you did not previously have any documents in your work breakdown structure, you may find that you wish to add some at this point.

If any components in the upcoming iteration are still lacking time estimates, your team should produce them. These can be quickly generated by using proxy estimation tables on the Task Details tab. If you don't have any estimation tables, or if the estimate generated by the table doesn't seem quite right, use engineering judgement to produce your best estimate of the time needed for a WBS item, and enter this estimate on the Task Time tab. If you find yourself switching tabs often, create a custom tab to gather the columns you use most.

2.5.2. Creating, Estimating, and Assigning Tasks

Once the components are refined to the team's satisfaction, the team is ready to plan the tasks involved in performing the work.

The simplest way to accomplish this is to apply the common processes/workflows defined earlier. Simply select one or more WBS items, then select an appropriate process/workflow from the Workflow menu. The contents of the given workflow will be inserted as children underneath each selected WBS item, and the component time estimate will be spread across the tasks according to the percentages you entered in the workflow editor. For more information, see the inserting workflows help topic.

Tasks can also be created directly by adding new rows to the WBS, clicking the icon to the left of the WBS item name, and choosing a Task type from the submenu.

When creating tasks, you have the option of using PSP Tasks. PSP Task items are automatically translated into PSP2.1 projects in an individual's dashboard hierarchy. As a result, you do not need to explicitly add the PSP2.1 phases (Design, Design Review, Code, Code Review, Compile, Test) in places where you have added a PSP Task.

Of course, the PSP Task focuses on the "personal" portion of the development lifecycle, so it does not automatically include Design Inspection and Code Inspection tasks. Those tasks should be entered as separate rows that immediately follow the PSP Task. If you follow this pattern, the inspection tasks will automatically be inserted into the correct order between the phases of the PSP Task in the individual's "Flat View" task list.

Generally, tasks should be subdivided until they are 10 hours or less. PSP Task elements, however, will be automatically subdivided into phases when they are copied into an individual's schedule. Thus, it is acceptable for PSP Tasks to be larger than 10 hours.

These workflow tools make it very easy to create a large number of tasks quickly. Unfortunately, if teams aren't paying attention, they can sometimes accidentally divide the work into tasks that are too small. If you have many tasks in your plan that are measured in minutes rather than hours, you may be falling into this trap. When personal plans contain a large number of small tasks, this can dramatically increase the amount of effort individuals must devote to daily metrics collection activities, which can foster an inaccurate perception that TSP requires "too much overhead." This perception can jeopardize your organization's chances for successful adoption of the TSP, so coaches should watch for this planning antipattern and advise teams to adjust their planning style.

For more information on editing values in the table on the right-hand side of the screen, see the Editing Metrics in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor help topic.

As you plan the work for the items in your WBS, it is helpful to assign tasks to individuals as you go. This way, the assigned individual can be allowed to provide their input into the time estimate. To assign tasks to individuals, simply enter team members' initials in the Assigned To column of the Task Time tab.

To save time, you can enter assignments and time estimates all at once in the Assigned To column. Just enter a person's initials, followed by the time estimate (in hours). As an example, the Int Test task above could be assigned to team member jh and estimated at 10 hours just by entering jh 10 in the Assigned To column.

This technique can also be used when several people are assigned to a task, but they do not all plan to spend the same amount of time. (This scenario is common for inspections - the author of a product typically participates in the inspection, but due to their different role, they will often spend more or less time than the other participants.) Just enter the time estimate after the appropriate person's initials. For example, if you wanted to indicate that the individual jas would only be spending two hours in the Code Inspection above, you could edit the Assigned To field to read jjd, jas(2), crw, jh.

If you find yourself moving back and forth between the various tabs of metrics, consider creating a custom tab to collect the metrics columns to need. The items on the Tabs menu make this possible.

2.5.3. Keeping the Workload Balanced

When creating a team project plan, it is important to ensure that the plan is balanced. In a balanced plan, each team member has been assigned an equitable portion of the total work, and all team members are projected to finish at approximately the same time. A balanced plan helps to maximize team efficiency and productivity.

The Work Breakdown Structure Editor provides a useful feedback mechanism that helps you to balance your project plan. From the Team menu, select the "Show Team Time Balancing Panel" option.

The Team Time Balancing Panel displays a colored bar for each team member. The horizontal bars indicate the start date and relative length of each team member's personal schedule. Each bar also shows the planned end date for each team member. If an individual is scheduled to leave the project before their planned completion date, a red area at the end of their bar will indicate that they are overtasked.

In addition, a vertical black bar shows the balanced team completion date. This is the calculated date that the project would complete if the work is balanced optimally. This date is also displayed on the horizontal black bar that represents the entire team. It is easy to balance the schedule visually, since any team member whose bar extends to the right of the vertical black line is over-tasked, and any team member whose bar falls short of the vertical black line is under-tasked. For example, in the image above, Jane Smith has been assigned more work than any other team member.

To resolve imbalances, reassign work from an over-tasked individual to an under-tasked one. You can reassign all of the tasks for a particular component by editing the "Assigned To" column at the component level. Just click on a set of initials and type a new value, and all of the subtasks will be transferred to the new person. For example, in the image above, you could edit the Assigned To value on the "Component A" row, replacing jas with jjd and vice versa, to have John Doe and Jane Smith swap task assignments.

During team planning, there will be times that you will prefer not to see the team balancing panel. You can alternately show and hide this panel by selecting the "Show Team Time Balancing Panel" option from the Team menu. Or if you only need to see the balanced team duration, you can click the icon to the left of the "Team (Balanced)" label to collapse the team member bars. Finally, if you wish to see bars for each person but hide the balanced team bar, open the Team menu and uncheck the "Show Balanced Team Bar" item.

2.5.3.1. Balancing within a Subteam

At other times, you may wish to balance work among a subset of the team. For example, on a multidisciplinary team made up of architects, business analysts, developers, testers, and others, you can't necessarily balance tasks from one type of person to another. In this case, you might wish to focus your balancing efforts on just the developers, just the analysts, etc. To do this, click the "Team" menu and choose "Balance within subteam." You can select a subset of the overall team, and the balancing panel will focus on those individuals. Bars will only be displayed for the people you specify, and the top-level balancing bar will show the optimally balanced completion dates for that subgroup. If you like, you can name these subgroups for use in future WBS editing sessions.

2.5.4. Editing Task Details

On the Task Details tab, you can enter additional information about the tasks in your plan.

Milestones: If you have entered milestones for the project, you can use this column to associate project components and tasks with particular milestones. Once you do this, color-coded diamonds will appear on the time balancing panel to indicate when each team member will complete their work for a given milestone, and when the team as a whole could complete each milestone if the work was perfectly balanced:

If you have entered a commit date for a particular milestone, that date will be displayed as a vertical dotted line. By comparing the colored diamonds to this vertical line, you can determine whether team members are overcommitted for a particular milestone. If so, you may need to reassign work so that each team member can finish their tasks before the commit date.

When balancing milestone work, you may prefer to see a stronger visual indicator than the colored diamonds. Select the "Use Milestone Colors" option on the Milestones menu, and the bar segments will be recolored based on the milestone they belong to (rather than the individual).

You can also highlight the work associated with a particular milestone by holding your mouse over a colored bar for a second or two. The milestone in question will be highlighted with animated diagonal stripes. If you move the mouse around, it will dynamically highlight other milestones. You can lock the stripes to a particular milestone by clicking on a bar segment; then unlock by clicking on the background behind the colored bars.

If your team has a large number of internal milestones (for example, for items such as "Code Complete" or "Deliver to Test"), the large number of diamonds may make the balancing bars difficult to read. In that case, you can optionally hide the diamonds for certain milestones by opening the Milestones window and checking the box in the "Hide" column as desired.

If a particular milestone is critical, you may wish to balance the workload through that milestone. Click the Milestones menu and choose to balance work through the milestone in question. The Team Time Balancing Panel will recalculate, and only display tasks up through and including the selected milestone. Each colored bar will indicate when the team member will complete the tasks through that milestone, and the vertical black bar will show the optimal team completion date for that milestone.

Task Labels: The Task Labels column allows you to associate keywords with the various tasks in your WBS. If you enter keywords in this column, the team project plan summary will allow you to filter project metrics rollups, to include only the tasks matching a given search expression. For more information on this filtering capability, see the Analyzing Filtered Data Using Labels help topic.

Estimated Proxy Type and Rel. Size: These columns are used to quickly estimate the size and time of a component. See the help topic on using estimating proxies for more information.

Task Dependencies: The Task Dependencies column allows you to define dependencies between tasks. You can declare dependencies on other tasks within your own project, or on tasks in other projects that belong to the same master project. Just double-click on a cell in this column to enter a list of dependencies for a particular task.

Task dependencies in the dashboard are used to coordinate work between individuals, but are not used to calculate critical path, and do not affect the scheduling of project tasks. These capabilities may be added in the future. But at the current time, task dependencies are simply a way of showing individuals the information they need in order to coordinate with their teammates more effectively. For more information on task dependencies, please see the Task Dependencies help topic.

Notes: As you create a plan and enter estimates, it is sometimes helpful to capture contextual information about a task. For example, you may want to capture the high-level scope for a particular work item, the assumptions used to generate the estimates, etc. Just double-click on the Notes column to enter comments about any component or task.

The resulting notes will appear as tooltips over the WBS hierarchy on the left-hand-side of the window. In addition, the notes will be copied into the personal plans of each team member for future reference. These notes are quickly accessible on the main dashboard toolbar while an individual is working on the annotated component or task.

If you include a URL in a note, the associated webpage will appear on the project reports/tools button when an individual is working on this item. This technique has many useful applications. You could include links to the issue tracker page for a new feature, the wiki page for team discussions about a component, or the page for an online code review. If your team has shortcuts that are universally applicable for the entire project, you can enter them in a note on the root element of the project, and they will always be a click or two away for all team members. For sites that require a login, you can tell the dashboard the name of the target page by enclosing the URL and page name in square brackets (e.g. [http://url/to/some/page Display This Title]).

For much more information on the use of task notes, see the Note Indicator help topic.

Custom Columns: The columns described above can be very useful for capturing details about the components and tasks in your plan. But if you need to capture project, team, or organization-specific values, you can create custom columns as well. See the help topic on Editing WBS Metrics for more information.

Saving Changes

As you work, save the work breakdown structure periodically by clicking the Save button on the toolbar.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. Your WBS changes will not be fully saved until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2.6. Master Project Coordination and Planning

Different organizations use different approaches to the planning of a master project. One common approach is to conduct simultaneous launch meetings for all of the team projects that make up a master project. If your organization uses this approach, you will find the information in this section useful.

2.6.1. Opening the Work Breakdown Structure

During a launch, most planning activities will be performed in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor. It is easy for several different subteams to be working in the WBS Editor at the same time:

  1. When installing the Process Dashboard, at least one person from each team should choose the "Tools for Team Leaders" option so they receive a Team Dashboard shortcut on their computer. Or, if you cannot bring this computer into the conference room where the launch is being held, you can install the Team Dashboard on the conference room computer. (Of course, the conference room computer must still have a network connection to the team's shared network directory.)
  2. During the launch, use this shortcut to open the Team Dashboard. You may receive a message stating that another individual has the Team Dashboard open; if so, click Yes to continue in read-only mode.
  3. When the Team Dashboard window appears, select your team project from the tree on the left. Then choose Work Breakdown Structure Editor from the list on the right.

If individuals have already joined the team project, individuals can also open the WBS Editor using the corresponding option on the script menu in their personal dashboard. If you open the WBS Editor in this way and intend to edit the overall team plan, you will probably want to open the WBS Editor's Team menu and make certain the box to "Optimize Editing Operations for ..." is unchecked. (For more information on this feature, see the help topic on personal editing optimized mode.)

2.6.2. Sharing Team Dashboard Access

There are a small number of launch planning tasks that are not performed within the WBS Editor. For example:

These activities would be performed in the Team Dashboard itself, not in the WBS Editor. To perform these activities, you must open the Team Dashboard in read-write mode. However, only one person can have the Team Dashboard open in read-write mode at a time. As a result, the various subteams may need to coordinate with each other to determine who is using the Team Dashboard at any given time.

Since these activities represent a relatively small portion of the overall launch, it is very possible that the teams won't need to perform these activities simultaneously. If a particular subteam needs read-write access to the Team Dashboard and they see that another team has it open, it may be sufficient to contact the other team and ask them to close the Team Dashboard if they are not using it.

If two subteams need to create their quality plans simultaneously, this can be accomplished by using a special technique:

  1. The leader of the master project should open the Team Dashboard on an appropriate computer.
  2. If this computer has a personal firewall installed, it should either be temporarily disabled, or configured to allow incoming connections to port 3000 from within the local area network (LAN).
  3. The leader of the master project should perform these steps for each team project:
    • Choose one of the team projects from the tree on the left side of the Team Dashboard window.
    • Select Team Project Tools from the list on the right.
    • Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the link with the following label:

      You can view this page from another computer by visiting:
      http://computer-name:3000/Project/Path/+/ABC-v1/team_tools.shtm

    • Copy and paste this hyperlink, and send it to the team leader for the project in question.
    • The team leader can open this hyperlink in their web browser to access the Project Parameters and Settings page (where they will enter quality planning parameters) and the Rollup Plan Summary (where they can view the resulting quality plan).
    • Repeat these steps for the other team projects.
  4. Leave the Team Dashboard running during the planning sessions.
Important: Because organizations have different network configurations, you should perform a dry run of these steps before your launch. This way, if you encounter connectivity problems, you can enlist your local tech support team in finding a resolution before the launch begins, and avoid disruptions to the team planning process. If you discover that your network will not support this special technique, you may need to schedule your various quality planning sessions so they do not overlap.

2.6.3. Viewing Consolidated Master Project Planning Data

While the individual project teams are developing their detailed plans, it is easy to see a master project view of the planning progress. In the Team Dashboard, select the master project from the tree on the left, then select Bottom-Up Work Breakdown Structure from the list on the right.

The bottom up Work Breakdown Structure will be displayed.

This window displays a WBS containing all of the components and tasks declared by all of the team projects that belong to this master project. Since the data is rolled up and computed, it is read-only. If you display the Team Time Balancing Panel, it will show the planned completion dates of each team project.

The data in this window will update in near-real-time. Each time a team project saves changes to their WBS, this window will see the changes within a few seconds, and recalculate its display.

2.7. Create Individual Team Member Plans

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 6)

Once the team plan is created and balanced, you can copy the data in this plan to create plans for each team member. For simplicity, it is best to wait until the team is satisfied with the balanced plan before proceeding to this step. The team leader should save the work breakdown structure (using the Save option on the File menu of the Work Breakdown Structure Editor), and then have each team member perform the steps below. (If any project tasks were assigned to the team leader, then the team leader should perform the steps below as well.)

Before an individual can follow the instructions below, they must have already installed the Process Dashboard and joined the team project. If a particular team member has not yet performed these steps, they must accomplish them first before they can follow the steps below.

2.7.1. Synchronize Work Breakdown Structure

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. The sync client needs to copy the latest WBS data from the cloud before you can ask the Process Dashboard to sync those changes into your personal plan.

On your personal computer, start the Process Dashboard. Use the hierarchy menus to navigate to the team project. Then click the script button and choose Sync Work Breakdown Structure.

Then wait while the dashboard copies data from the team plan.

2.7.2. Review Planned Tasks and Schedule

Return to your Process Dashboard window. From the script menu, choose Project Task & Schedule. Your personal schedule will be displayed.

The top half of this window shows a list of tasks assigned to you. Review this list of tasks to ensure that it appears correct.

The bottom half of the window shows your personal schedule. Each row shows a particular week on the calendar. The Planned Time (PT) column shows the number of hours you might be able to spend on productive project work each week. Review this information to ensure that it appears correct. If any changes are necessary, make the appropriate edits and click the Save button. You can then close the Task and Schedule window if you wish.

2.7.3. Export Personal Data

Finally, return to your Process Dashboard window. Click the script button and select the Export My Data Now option.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. Your data isn't fully exported until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.

2.8. View Bottom-Up Team Plan

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 6)

Once each team member has created their individual plan using the steps above, you can view the consolidated team plan.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. The sync client needs to copy the latest team member data from the cloud before you can ask the Team Dashboard to import it.

In the Team Dashboard, select the team project from the tree on the left. Then select Import All Data Now from the list on the right.

Then return to the Team Dashboard window and select Team Project Tools from the list on the right.

On that page, click the Show Status of Team Member Metrics button. A table will be displayed, showing each team member who has joined the project, along with the date and time when they last exported their personal metrics.

Review this information carefully. If any team member is not listed, that person has not joined the team project. If their timestamp is old, they have not yet copied their tasks from the team Work Breakdown Structure. Communicate with team members as necessary, and help them to resolve any problems they might be having. To recheck for new data, click the Refresh Data hyperlink.

When it appears that all team members have successfully created their personal plans, return to the Team Dashboard and select Project Task & Schedule from the list on the right. The task list for this project will be displayed, and should include an entry for each member of the team. Review this list to ensure that everything appears correct:

After working with individuals to fix any of these problems, you must close and reopen the Task & Schedule window to refresh the data.

When the team is satisfied with the bottom up plan, it is a good idea to save a baseline. In the Task & Schedule window, choose "Tools → Save Baseline." This will enable your team to see how the plan changes in the future. If you forget to do this step at the end of your launch, choose "Tools → Manage Baselines/Snapshots." This will show a list of snapshots the Team Dashboard has saved automatically over time. Select a snapshot that was saved shortly after your launch finished, and click "Make Active" to make it the official baseline.

You can view the bottom-up earned value plan for the project by clicking the Report button on the Task and Schedule window.

To view the entire project plan, switch to the Team Dashboard window and select the "Rollup Plan Summary" option from the list on the right. The rollup plan summary will appear in your Web browser.

This plan summary form will display the customized forms and reports that were created earlier. For more information on the content and customization of this form, see the Creating / Customizing Process Forms and Reports help topic.

You can drill down into the subcomponents of your team plan by clicking on the () icon.

2.9. Create Quality Plan

(TSP Launch Meeting No. 5)

Because of the way the dashboard currently handles team quality data, it is necessary to create individual team member plans before you can view the team quality plan. This means that you should most likely alter the launch schedule, folding launch meeting No. 6 back into launch meeting No.4.

Once you have successfully validated the bottom-up team plan, you may proceed with the steps below.

2.9.1. Workflow-Driven Quality Plans

During planning, teams create workflows to define their development process. If your team has created workflows, applied them to components in the WBS, assigned those tasks to individuals, and had the individuals perform a "Sync to WBS," you can view quality plans for each workflow in use.

To view the quality plan for a workflow, open the project's Rollup Plan Summary report, navigate to the "Workflow Summary" section, and select the workflow you wish to analyze.

Several of the tables and charts in the "Workflow Summary" section will depict the number of defects that the team expects to inject and remove in each phase, and the number of defects that will still be present in the components after the workflow is complete. If these values do not measure up to your team's quality goals, you can edit the quality parameters for the workflow, save the changes, and refresh this report.

Note: workflow-driven quality plans were introduced in Process Dashboard version 2.5. If you wish to view the quality plan for an older project, it may be necessary to open that team project's WBS at least once and save a trivial change. (This step gives the WBS Editor a chance to add default quality parameter values to the project workflows.)

2.9.2. Overarching Quality Plans

The workflow-driven quality plans described above are informative because they are aligned to the custom processes the team has defined. But often, workflows only cover a portion of the end-to-end development process: for example, a team might have separate workflows for requirements vs implementation. In this case, it can be helpful to see a quality model that covers the entire development process, to estimate how many defects will remain in the final delivered product.

One powerful and flexible way to accomplish this is to create a workflow that describes the entire, end-to-end development process. Then, map all of the other workflows to this end-to-end workflow. After configuring those mappings, view the quality plan for the end-to-end workflow.

But for most projects, a much simpler approach is possible. The steps in every workflow are already mapped to the phases in the team project's metrics collection framework; so the dashboard can automatically generate an end-to-end quality plan based on those framework phases.

The framework-driven quality parameters can be edited on the Team Project Parameters and Settings page, which can be opened by clicking the appropriate item on the main Team Dashboard window.

This page includes:

Follow the guidance provided in the TSP process to create these estimates.

Using the quality parameters entered on the page above, and data from your team's project plan, the dashboard will calculate a quality plan for your project and include it as part of the overall project plan. To view this quality plan, switch to the Team Dashboard window, select the team project from the tree on the left, and click the Rollup Plan Summary option in the list on the right. The rollup plan summary will appear in your web browser.

Next, click the "Quality Summary" section from the list on the left. This will display a quality plan based on the phases in the metrics collection framework. You can drill down and see the quality plans for various project subcomponents by clicking on the () icon.

If the calculated quality metrics do not meet your team's quality goals, you may edit the project quality parameters described above, in keeping with the guidance in the TSP process. To simplify this task, open two browser windows: one containing the project parameters page, and the other containing the calculated quality plan. As you edit the quality parameters, calculated values (displayed as numbers in grey boxes) will recalculate automatically. To update views of graphical charts, you will need to refresh the page manually.

2.10. Exploring Alternative Plans

During team project planning, it is often necessary to explore trade-offs between cost, schedule, and scope - for example, to propose several alternative plans to management. And later during the execution of the team project, it may be necessary to explore "what if" scenarios - for example, to determine the potential impact of a major change to the team plan. There are two possible ways to accomplish these types of tasks.

2.10.1. Option 1: Saving Multiple Alternative Plans

The WBS Editor offers a comprehensive facility for saving and editing multiple independent, alternative plans. To create an alternative plan, choose "File → Save a Copy." This will save a ZIP file containing a complete copy of your plan (including the WBS, team member list, workflows, and milestones). You can save as many copies as you like, each in a separate ZIP file.

Then, you can choose "File → Open" in the WBS Editor window to open one of these alternative plans. (You can also open an alternative plan by dragging and dropping the ZIP file onto the Quick Launcher window.) A second WBS Editor window will open to show the data from the selected ZIP file. The name of the ZIP file will be displayed in the title bar of this window to distinguish it from your "official" project plan. You can edit this alternative plan, and the colored balancing bars will show the projected date when the alternative plan might finish. The "File → Save" option will write your changes back into the ZIP file.

After exploring alternative plans and presenting them to management, you may select a particular plan that the team intends to follow. In the Team Dashboard, select your team project from the tree on the left, and click the option from the list on the right to open the WBS for your project. Then choose "File → Replace Data." A warning dialog will be displayed. Read the warning information carefully and press the "Yes" button to confirm. Then select the ZIP file containing your team's chosen alternative plan. Your team's WBS, team member list, workflows, and milestones will be replaced with the data read from the ZIP file. Review the new data to make sure you selected the correct ZIP file, then choose "File → Save" to commit this as the official plan for your team project.

2.10.2. Option 2: Exploring Scope/Schedule Tradeoffs Using Milestones

The "Save a Copy" feature described above provides a lot of power for exploring arbitrary plan alternatives; but if your alternative plans center around tradeoffs between scope and schedule, a simpler technique may be more convenient for your team.

This technique leverages the power of milestones to explore scope changes. To use this technique, open the Milestones window. If you do not already have a milestone representing the actual project delivery, create one. In addition, create a new milestone for each deliverable that could potentially be moved in and out of scope. (Selecting the "Hide" checkbox for these optional deliverables may be helpful.)

Back in the WBS Editor, use the Milestone column on the Task Details tab to tag components and tasks that fall under the scope of each of these optional deliverables. Use the "Final Delivery" milestone as a catch-all to tag the components and tasks that must be completed, but that do not belong to any other milestone. One way to declare this "catch-all" is to set "Final Delivery" as the milestone for the first row in the WBS (the row that represents the overall team project).

Once milestones are assigned, click on the Milestones menu and select the option to "Balance Work Through" the "Final Delivery" milestone.

With these changes in place, you can now open the Milestones window and change the order of the "Optional Scope" milestones relative to "Final Delivery." (You can use the Move Up/Move Down operations on the toolbar to change the relative order of the milestones in the list.)

The image below demonstrates Optional Scope Item #1 being accomplished as part of the work for the "Iteration 2 Release," and the Optional Scope Item #2 being moved out of scope for the entire project.

As you reorder these milestones, the colored balancing bars will dynamically update to display new projections that take your scope changes into account.

When you present your alternative plans to management, they may agree to remove some of these optional items from the project scope. When you receive this direction, move the optional scope item to the end of the milestones list, and click the "Defer Sync" checkbox. This will tell the dashboard not to copy the related tasks into team members' personal plans.

2.11. Save Backup of Project Data

At the conclusion of your team project launch, you should save a data backup of the team dashboard. From the main Team Dashboard window, choose File → Save Data Backup.

This will save a ZIP file with a snapshot of all the data for all of the team projects in your Team Dashboard. You can use the Process Dashboard Quick Launcher to open this backup at any time in the future, and view all reports exactly as they appeared when the backup was made.

It is also a good idea to save a data backup each week during your project. This provides a useful history of your project's progress.

2.11.1. Submitting Data to the SEI

At the end of their launch, users of the Team Software Process are encouraged to submit their data to the Software Engineering Institute. The SEI uses this data to perform research into the benefits of the TSP.

To support that research, teams can simply use the "Save Data Backup" feature, then send the resulting ZIP file to the SEI. If your company is concerned about releasing proprietary information in this backup, you might consider saving the backup in "Redacted" format and choosing to scramble the types of data (e.g. task names, names of individuals, etc) that you deem to be sensitive.

2.11.2. Creating HTML Snapshots

At times, you may need to share a copy of your plan with a manager or other stakeholder who does not have the Dashboard Quick Launcher installed. For this purpose, a second export mechanism is provided that saves a non-interactive copy of the team project plan summary report. To accomplish this, open the team dashboard, select the team project from the tree on the left, and choose Team Project Tools from the list on the right. When the Team Project Tools page appears, click the "Save Snapshot of Project Plan" button. This will save a static snapshot of the web pages that make up the team project plan summary report. You can choose to save the file in various formats, which can be viewed later in programs such as Internet Explorer.

2.12. Editing the Work Breakdown Structure

The Work Breakdown Structure Editor and the Common Workflows Editor both display a hierarchical collection of WBS items in an outline format. You can edit this outline using both the mouse and the keyboard, in a manner that will feel familiar to users of Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Word. This section explains many of the editing features that are available for editing the hierarchical WBS.

All of the features above are designed to make editing the WBS easy and fast, so you can create a useful plan during your team project launch. However, you should take additional care when editing the WBS after the project has begun. For more information, see the help topic on editing the WBS after project launch.

2.12.1. Inserting Common Team Workflows

In the Work Breakdown Structure Editor, you can quickly add the contents of a process/workflow that you previously defined in the Common Team Workflows Editor. Simply select a target WBS item, and then select the desired workflow from the Workflow menu. The contents of the selected workflow will be added as children of the selected target WBS item. For example, suppose you have the following defined process:

and the following WBS:

If you were to highlight Component B and choose Simple Process from the Workflow menu, it would produce the following WBS:

You can also insert a workflow by highlighting a component and typing Ctrl-W (or Command-W on Mac OS X). If you make a mistake (for example, inserting the workflow under the wrong WBS item), you can always undo it using the undo button ().

Rectangular icons () are used to indicate tasks that were created by the application of a workflow. It is important to note that these items inserted into your WBS via this method are copies of the items in the defined process or workflow. As a result, you can freely edit the inserted items without affecting the official process/workflow definition. For example:

This also means, however, that if you use the Common Team Workflows Editor to alter the definition of a process/workflow later, those changes will not automatically be propagated into the team's WBS. For example, if you were to open the Common Team Workflows Editor and delete the Planning step from the definition of the "Simple Process" workflow shown above, that change would not automatically affect the list of tasks under Component B. It would continue to include a Planning step.

If you make a change to a workflow and you would like that change to propagate into the WBS, use the "Reapply Workflow" option on the workflow menu. This option can be used in several ways:

Reapplying a workflow will make the following changes:

You can optionally choose to update task time estimates based on the latest workflow percentages.

2.12.2. Using Workflow Rates on Older Projects

In older projects, the workflow editor offered the option to enter productivity rates for workflows. That functionality became obsolete with the introduction of proxy estimation tables, and is no longer available for projects created with Process Dashboard 2.6.3 and higher. This section describes the obsolete functionality for teams working with older projects.

2.12.2.1. Entering Workflow Rates

The workflow editor offers a number of advanced columns for customizing workflow behavior. On older projects, these include the Rate and Units columns, which can be used to generate time estimates from size. If you happen to know the typical productivity rates (based on historical or estimated team averages) for all the tasks in a workflow, you can enter those rates in this column. For example, you might wish to state that a Code Review task takes place at a rate of 200 LOC/Hr, or that a PSP Task completes at a rate of 20 LOC/Hr. Here is an example for a possible team software development process:

When you apply this workflow to a component in your team project, the WBS Editor will look at the estimated size for the component. It will use that size, along with the percentages and productivity rates you have entered, to generate an effort estimate for each task in the component.

Note that that this behavior differs from the "percentage-only" behavior that is typically used. This is a very important consideration. When you examine a single team workflow, if any task has a number in the Rate column, the workflow will use size estimates to produce time/effort estimates. If no rates are present, the workflow will let you enter a top-level time estimate, then use the percentages to spread the time across the tasks. You should decide which mode you wish to use for each workflow, then either (a) leave the rate column blank, or (b) enter rates for every task.

When a task in a workflow is performed by more than one person, effort estimates will be generated differently based on the presence of a value in the "%" column. If you have placed a number in the "%" column, the WBS will understand that this task is a percentage of an overall workflow; so that percentage describes the total amount of work that will be spread across those individuals. If you leave the "%" column blank and enter a Rate, the WBS will understand that each individual is independently working at that rate.

An example illustrates this best. When you examine the "Simple Process" workflow above, three individuals will be working on the "Code Inspection" task. That task has been described as a task that requires "200 LOC/Hr". So if you apply this workflow to a component that has 400 LOC, three people will be working on this task, and each one will spend two hours. In contrast, the "Integration Test" task has been described as being 12% of a workflow that requires 10 LOC/Hr. For a 400 LOC component, that end-to-end workflow will take 40 hours. 12% of 40 hours is 4.8 hours, so this is the total time that will be allocated to the "Integration Test" task. Three people are assigned, and the time will be spread across them equally, so each one will spend 1.6 hours.

The Rate column can be a useful way to produce times estimates, but it does have a number of important limitations. For example, it requires the team to apply detailed workflows to "placeholder" components in future iterations, just to answer high-level questions about when the overall project could finish. And it doesn't provide flexibility for a single process to have a range of different rates based on the complexity of a given component. For these and other reasons, the recommended best practice is to capture productivity rates in proxy estimation tables, leave the Rate column blank, and only use the percentage column to describe the allocation of workflow time.

2.12.2.2. Applying Rate-Driven Workflows

To use a rate-driven workflow for planning, begin by entering a size estimate on a WBS component:

When you apply the workflow to the component, your size estimate will be combined with the workflow rates and percentages to generate planned times for each task:

2.12.3. Importing Tasks from Microsoft Project

If a team has performed some preplanning using Microsoft Project, limited portions of that data can be imported into the WBS Editor. Specifically, the following data can be imported:

However, this data import has significant limitations and caveats; please read the section below very carefully.

To use this feature, take the following steps:

  1. Open your MS Project file. Double-check that the resource initials for each team member match the initials you've used in the WBS Editor's Team Member List.
  2. Choose "File → Save As".  In the "Save as type:" field, choose either CSV or Text format.  Click the "Save" button, and MS Project will display the "Export Wizard."
  3. On the second page of the Export Wizard, it will ask whether you want to create a new map or use an existing one. For simplicity, you can choose to use an existing map, and on the next screen, choose "Task 'Export Table' map."
  4. Click forward through the screens of the Export Wizard until you reach the page listing the data fields that will be exported. If you wish to export resource assignments, add the "Resource Initials" field to this list.
  5. Finish the Export Wizard. MS Project data will be saved to the file you selected.
  6. In the Work Breakdown Structure Editor, open the Team Member List. Double-check values in the "Est Hours/Week" column, as they will be used to convert MS Project cost estimates (which are typically measured in days) into WBS cost estimates (which are measured in hours). Save changes if necessary and close the Team Member List.
  7. On the WBS Editor window, choose "File → Import from MS Project CSV file". The WBS Editor will prompt for the file to open; browse to and select the file you just exported from MS Project. The new tasks will be added to the bottom of your WBS under a node called "Imported Items."
  8. If your project is a member of a master project, you will need to copy and paste imported items to arrange them underneath the appropriate core work items from the master project.
  9. MS Project unfortunately has no idea about the process phases in a high-maturity project. As such, you will need to manually configure the type of each imported item by clicking the icon on each imported row.

Important: Although this data import feature can be helpful for some teams, its functionality is very limited. Its only purpose is to reduce typing for teams that have an existing MS Project plan.

Teams should not expect a robust transfer of data, as most of the fields in MS Project will not be imported. In addition, this import feature is unrelated to the dashboard's ability to export the GANTT chart for an earned value schedule to MS Project. Round-tripping is wholly out of the question.

In addition, the EV scheduling techniques used by PSP/TSP are completely different from the critical path scheduling techniques used by MS Project. Task predecessors imported from MS Project will not be used by the dashboard to perform critical path analysis. As a result, all of the chronology information in the MS Project plan (e.g. start date and end date) will be lost during this import. Individuals will still need to use the "Flat View" to specify the order in which they will perform tasks, and the dashboard will calculate task start dates and end dates based on that information alone - not based on any information found in the MS Project plan.

Within the TSP community, some teams do successfully use MS Project alongside TSP earned value analysis, but no automated support is currently provided for any ongoing, two-way communication between the dashboard and MS Project. Also, reconciling critical-path scheduling techniques with direct-time-driven earned value planning is beyond the scope of this document.

To reiterate: The only purpose of this feature is to reduce typing for teams that need to import data from an existing MS Project plan. Any other expectation from this functionality is unwarranted.

2.12.4. Editing Metrics in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor

In the Work Breakdown Structure Editor, the right-hand side of the screen contains several tabs. These tabs display various collections of metrics for the items in your WBS. Select a tab to view or edit those metrics.

Within these metrics panels, several typesetting conventions are used to convey information.

For example, gray text is used to indicate read-only data. If text is not gray, you can edit it directly. For example, in the second line of the table above, you can see that Component A is estimated to contain 1,230 lines of code, and take 94.8 hours. You may edit these numbers directly! (This often takes people by surprise, as many planning tools do not permit you to edit top-down values.) This feature can be very useful and powerful for planning. For example, historical data rates (inherited from a process/workflow definition) may have produced the estimate of 94.8 hours for Component A. If your team feels that Component A is more complex and will require additional time, simply edit the value 94.8 and replace it with your team's actual estimate for the component. The time estimates for all of the tasks underneath Component A will automatically be scaled proportionally. Similarly, you can change a set of initials in the Assigned To column to reassign an entire branch of the WBS from one person to another.

Some values may be displayed in a bold red font to indicate a serious error. Hover the mouse over the value in question, and a tool tip will explain the problem. Less serious problems are highlighted with a bold blue font. (For example, the tasks in the picture above have not been assigned to any team members.)

For keyboard-based navigation of the user interface, you can also select the active tab by pressing Ctrl-T on Windows/Unix, or Command-T on Mac OS X. After selecting a tab in this way, press the "Tab" key on your keyboard to move back to the WBS table.

Support is also provided for copying and pasting metrics data from one part of the WBS to another, and for copying and pasting data from other programs such as Excel. If you copy a rectangle of cells in an Excel spreadsheet, you can paste the data into a similar rectangle of cells on the right-hand side of the WBS, and vice versa. To copy, type Ctrl-C; to paste, type Ctrl-V. These operations are repeated on the Edit menu as "Copy WBS Data" and "Paste WBS Data". (Note that the copy and paste buttons on the toolbar will paste entirely new WBS items into the hierarchy, rather than pasting data into existing cells.)

2.12.4.1. Custom WBS Columns

As you create your project plan, you may find the need to capture information that is project, team, or organization-specific. For example, you might want to record details like:

Often, this information can simply be entered into the task note. But if you would like to take a more structured approach, you can create custom columns to hold particular pieces of data. Just choose "Custom Columns..." from the "Tabs" menu. This approach can provide a number of benefits:

When you create custom columns, they will appear on the "Task Details" tab by default. However, it is usually more convenient to create new tabs that group together the columns you edit most often, as described below.

2.12.4.2. Custom Tabs

The WBS Editor provides several default tabs showing preset collections of data, but you are not limited to those tabs. To support team-specific planning styles, click the "New Tab" that appears to the right of the preexisting tabs. You can customize the columns that appear on your new tab by selecting Tabs → Change Tab Columns. Although you can alter the columns that appear on your custom tabs, the original tabs will always remain the same; this provides continuity for other coaches or mentors that need to look at your team plan.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2.12.5. Allowing Team Members to Edit the Work Breakdown Structure

By default, the dashboard will allow all team members to open the Work Breakdown Structure and edit tasks. This is a helpful approach, as it allows individuals to define new tasks and to refine existing tasks as needed. This aligns well with the high-maturity concept of self-directed teams.

A small number of teams may prefer not to use this approach. If you do not want to allow team members to edit the WBS, open the WBS from the Team Dashboard and choose "Edit → Preferences". To prevent team members from editing the WBS, uncheck the appropriate box.

When team members are allowed to edit the WBS, the coach, team leader, or planning manager may be interested in seeing the changes that other people have made recently. See the help topic on reviewing plan changes for more information about how this is done.

2.12.5.1. Special Editing Behavior for Team Members

When an individual team member opens the WBS from their personal dashboard, the WBS Editor becomes aware of the team member who opened it, and optimizes the editing behavior for that individual:

These behaviors can be disabled by toggling a checkbox in the WBS Editor's "Team" menu. This can be useful if an individual such as the Planning Manager needs to make a change that affects other team members.

2.12.6. Simultaneous Editing of the Work Breakdown Structure

The Work Breakdown Structure is the focal point of the team's planning activities, both during the launch and afterward during the project itself. There will be times when several people may need to modify the plan at the same time. Accordingly, the WBS Editor will allow more than one person to make changes simultaneously.

When you choose "File → Save" to save your changes to the Work Breakdown Structure, the application will check to see if other individuals have recently saved changes as well. If they have, the save operation will merge their changes into your view.

If you wish to merge other people's recently saved changes into your view without saving your own in-progress edits, choose "File → Refresh Data."

In either case, if the merge identifies editing conflicts (where you and another individual have made conflicting edits to the same value), warning messages will be displayed. These warnings include hyperlinks that help you to locate and recover from the editing conflict.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. The sync client needs to actively copy WBS changes to and from the cloud to support simultaneous editing.

2.12.7. Understanding the Role of the Work Breakdown Structure

Stepping back from the details for a moment, it is very important to understand the relationship between the Work Breakdown Structure and the rest of your team project.

As any TSP practitioner knows, the project launch meetings used in the Team Software Process are very intense planning sessions. This allows them to produce extremely powerful team plans; but since your entire team is present, these meetings are relatively expensive from a business standpoint. Recognizing this, the Process Dashboard team wanted to provide the best possible tool support to facilitate these meetings. The WBS Editor is specifically designed to meet this need. Everything about its design and user interface is streamlined to facilitate the unique planning needs of a project launch - enabling you to create the highest-quality team plan, while minimizing the time required and eliminating frustrations whenever possible.

For example, the contents of the WBS are edited "offline," in a mode that is completely disconnected with the data in regular dashboard datasets. This offline approach allows dramatic changes to be made to the hierarchy of the WBS quickly, without waiting for those changes to be applied to an entire database of existing project metrics.

The tradeoff, of course, is that individuals must occasionally use the "Sync to WBS" buttons to copy project planning metrics to their personal dashboard. The "Sync to WBS" operation searches for changes that have been made in the WBS, and copies those changes into the personal plan. In addition, when individuals make changes to their personal plan, "Sync to WBS" will attempt to copy those changes back as well.

However, it is important to realize that the individual plans are the "gold standard" used to compute rolled up project metrics and reports. When you view the team earned value plan or the team rollup plan summary, you are viewing data that has been rolled up from the personal plans of each team member. If the team member plans are not in sync with the WBS, the rollup will reflect the data in the team member plans - not the data in the WBS.

2.12.8. Editing the WBS After Project Launch

The Work Breakdown Structure Editor is designed to make editing easy and fast. Since the launch requires you to create a large and complex plan in a short period of time, this is a great help during a project launch.

Later in the project launch, individuals will perform a "Sync to WBS" operation. This builds a personal plan for each team member which reflects their assignments in the team WBS. As the project begins, they will refine estimates and collect actual data against these WBS elements.

Throughout the project, the team can continue to make changes to the WBS. Individuals then perform a "Sync to WBS" operation and receive these changes. For example:

This is a very powerful set of features. But with power comes responsibility! Once people have started collecting data, you should no longer perform heavy-handed edits to the WBS, because the exact sequence of edits will be applied to personal plans with a literal interpretation.

2.12.8.1. Common Mistakes

Some examples may make this clear. Here are examples of accidental changes that people could make without realizing the consequences. (Do not follow these examples!)

Scenario: While editing, someone realizes that an item was inserted in the wrong place, causing two adjacent items to be out of order.
Mistake: They decide to rename item "A" to "B" and vice versa.
Consequence: In the personal plan, time log entries and other actual data for item "A" will be moved to item "B" and vice versa.
The Right Way: To change the order of elements, use the move up/move down buttons.

Scenario: While editing the WBS, a person deletes a task by accident.
Mistake: They recreate the task by adding a new row and giving it the same name as before.
Consequence: When individuals perform a sync to WBS, the sync will want to delete the existing task and create a new one in its place with the same name.
The Right Way: In this case, the person should have used the Undo feature to back out the accidental deletion.

Scenario: While editing the WBS, a person accidentally inserts a duplicate item.
Mistake: To resolve the "duplicate name" error, the individual deletes one of the items - but mistakenly deletes the original item instead of the newly inserted duplicate.
Consequence: When individuals perform a sync to WBS, the sync will want to delete the existing task and create a new one in its place with the same name.
The Right Way: It is never correct to delete a task and create a new one in its place with the same name. The person should have switched to the "Actual Time" tab and taken a look to see which task was the original task, and which one was the new accidental duplicate. Then, they should have deleted the accidental duplicate item.

Scenario: The project launch has concluded and people are busily working on tasks. The process manager decides to change the team process, and makes changes to the Common Team Workflows. Of course this does not affect the tasks that are already present in the WBS.
Mistake: So the process manager decides that the easiest way to update the plan is to delete the existing tasks out from under each component, then reapply the workflows manually.
Consequence: When individuals perform a sync to WBS, the sync will want to delete all of their existing tasks and create new ones, causing a great deal of headaches for the entire team.
The Right Way: Existing tasks in the plan represent real plan entities. If no one has started work on them, it is OK to delete them. But once people attach actual data (size, effort, defects, etc.) to nodes, you should not delete them. Instead, you should use the Reapply Workflow option to update the affected tasks.

Scenario: During the launch, the team created a plan for "Component A". Some time after the project has started, the team realizes that "Component A" will not be required after all. Instead, a brand new feature called "Component X" needs to be developed.
Mistake: The planning manager decides that one component is going away and another is being created instead. So to save work, they just rename the existing WBS item from "Component A" to "Component X".
Consequence: The sync operation will rename "Component A" to "Component X" in each personal plan. All of the size, effort, defect, and completion data that was previously collected against Component A will now be applied to Component X.
The Right Way: Create a brand new component in the WBS called Component X. If this component has the same structure as Component A, you can use copy-paste to duplicate the WBS task structure. Then, you can expand Component A and delete the tasks that haven't been started yet.

2.12.8.2. Understanding

The bottom line is this: during a launch, when the team plan exists only in the WBS, you can feel free to make massive changes. But once the project has started, you should slow down and be mindful of the edits you make.

Understanding is the key to using this successfully. It is helpful to know that each node in the WBS has an internal ID number that acts as a unique identifier. The number is assigned when the node is created. The number does not change when the node is renamed, or when it is moved using cut-and-paste. When you perform sync operations, the sync logic matches nodes in the WBS and nodes in the personal plan using these internal ID numbers; it does not match nodes by name. (Otherwise, how could the sync logic ever carry out your rename operations for you?) So a series of edits that destroys WBS items and creates new ones with the same names will not fool the sync logic - it will carry out the same destructive changes verbatim.

The WBS is designed to be edited, and the "Sync" functionality stands ready to apply your changes to the personal plans. Do not be afraid of using them! Just pay attention to what you're doing when you insert, delete, move, and rename WBS items.

2.12.8.3. Subdividing Tasks

In fact, once you understand how the WBS and the Sync operations work together, you can use these wisely to your advantage. Here is an example. Suppose that during the launch, you created a very large task called "Task A". Very little was known about this task during the launch, so the team was unable to break it down any farther. Instead, they just put a large number of hours directly on Task A. After the project gets underway, the individual working on Task A spends some time researching the task. This gives them the insight they need to break the task down further, into parts 1 through 5. The individual might open the WBS and carefully make the following changes:

At the next sync, this sequence of edits will be applied to the personal plan. In particular, a new "Task A" parent task will be created; the existing task in the personal plan will be renamed to "Research" and will be placed under the new parent task; all existing time log entries will move along with it. Finally, new subtasks will be created to reflect the work that remains. Once the sync is done, the individual will be able to mark "Research" complete and earn value for the work done so far.

This general model could be used for any large task that needs to be broken down further. But to avoid confusion, it is only recommended when a single individual is assigned to the task.

If this example confuses you, don't worry; you could take a simpler approach. During the launch, create Task A and immediately create two subtasks: "Research" and "Execution". Guess how much work will be required to do the research, then put the remaining block of time on the Execution task. Once the individual finishes their research phase, they can replace the "Execution" placeholder with several subtasks that reflect the refined work plan.


3. Running a Team Project

Once the plan is in place, the team is ready to start the work! The Process Dashboard provides extensive support for team members and team leaders as they execute the plan and track their progress.

Many of the dashboard's features are documented extensively elsewhere in the help. The sections below are designed to provide a quick overview of the most important features a team will use.

3.1. Team Members

3.1.1. Collecting Earned Value Metrics (Team Member)

As you perform the tasks in your project plan, you will find earned value to be the most important means of gauging your progress. Earned value can tell you if you are ahead or behind schedule, whether work is taking more or less time than expected, and even whether you are projected to finish on time. To calculate earned value, the dashboard needs to know the actual amount of time you spend on each task, as well as the date each task is completed. The dashboard makes it easy to collect this information.

The instructions below provide a quick introduction to several of the most common features you will use on a team project. Much more information is available elsewhere in the online help.

As you work, use the active task selector on the dashboard to designate the task you are currently performing.

For convenience, you can choose to work through the tasks that have been assigned to you for this project. Click the double-left-arrow that appears to the left of the active task name, choose "Tasks Lists," and select the earned value task list you're using for this team project. Then, the active task selector will show you the tasks you need to perform, listed in chronological order as they appear in your task list. (To change the chronological order of these tasks, see the discussion of "Flat View" in the Managing Your Personal Earned Value Schedule help topic.)

Use the Play/Pause button to start/stop an internal timer. When you begin working, start the timer. When you are interrupted or you stop for the day, stop the timer.

There is a small down-arrow to the right of the play/pause button. Clicking this down-arrow will display a menu of tasks to which you have logged time recently. You can make a selection from this list to quickly resume a recently interrupted task.

If you make a mistake when logging time (for example, if you forget to start or stop the timer), you can correct the mistake with the Time Log Editor. To open the Time Log Editor, choose Time Log from the menu.

The task note indicator appears to the right of the hierarchy menus. Click this icon to read and edit notes about the components and tasks assigned to you. You can enter or edit notes about the tasks in your plan, but be aware that these notes will be seen and shared with the entire team.

When you select a task that has a dependency, an icon will appear to the right of the note indicator. This icon tells you whether the task depends upon other tasks, whether those other tasks are completed, and much more information. Place your mouse over the icon for more detailed information about the dependency. For more information about this feature, see the Task Dependencies help topic.

When you complete a task, mark it complete by checking the box at the far right hand side of the dashboard window. If you mark a task complete by mistake, you can clear the checkbox to mark it incomplete.

Checking the box will mark the current task complete as of the current date and time. If a task was completed in the past but you forgot to mark it complete, press the Ctrl key while you check the box. This will display a window allowing you to select the correct completion date.

3.1.2. Refining your Personal Project Plan (Team Member)

With the team project launch complete, your dashboard will contain a list of project tasks for you to perform. These tasks appear underneath the team project in your dashboard hierarchy.

As you work on the project, your understanding of these tasks will grow, and you may need to alter your original plan. If you discover that a task is much larger or smaller than originally anticipated, you can change the estimate for the task by clicking on the Percent Spent indicator. (This is the blue or red bar that appears to the right of the play/pause button.) You can also edit time estimates by opening your earned value task & schedule plan, and changing the numbers in the PT (Planned Time) column.

Of course, it is also common to discover new tasks that need to be performed and changes to existing tasks. If you just need to create a simple task, you can click the Add Task button on the main dashboard toolbar. If you need to rename a task, move a task, subdivide a task, delete a task, create a component, or use a team workflow, click the script button and choose Work Breakdown Structure Editor.

You can make changes to the tasks in the Work Breakdown Structure, and when you save the changes they will appear in your personal plan.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. Your WBS changes will not be fully saved until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.

Some team leaders may choose to lock down the work breakdown structure. In that case, you may be able to look at the Work Breakdown Structure, but will not be able to make changes. If so, you may need to ask your team leader or planning manager to make changes on your behalf.

3.1.3. Managing Your Personal Earned Value Schedule (Team Member)

When you joined the team project, the dashboard created an earned value schedule for you to use in tracking your work. During the team project launch, when you synchronized your work breakdown structure, it created tasks and added them to your earned value schedule. In the process, it copied over the initial estimates that you and your team made during the planning process.

During the course of the project, however, you will gain new insights into the tasks assigned to you, and it may become obvious that some of the initial estimates were very inaccurate. When you discover that a task's current time estimate is significantly high or low, you should correct the estimate for that task. One easy way to edit those time estimates is to open your earned value schedule.

In addition, when you add tasks or refine existing tasks, you will need to enter the planned time values for the new tasks. The earned value schedule is a convenient place to edit time estimates.

Open your earned value schedule by clicking the script button and choosing Project Task & Schedule.

If there are problems with your earned value schedule, a red Errors button will appear. Errors will also be highlighted in the task list with red lettering. You can get a short description of the error by hovering the mouse over the red lettering, and a longer description by clicking on the Errors button.

The top half of the window lists the tasks assigned to you. Enter the planned time for various tasks in the PT column. Values that are editable are displayed with a yellow background.

You will generally not perform the tasks in the order they appear in the hierarchy. To define the order you intend to perform the tasks, click the Flat View checkbox. This will display your tasks in a plain list instead of a hierarchy. You can then reorder the tasks by selecting them then dragging them up and down. Defining the task order will allow the dashboard to generate a meaningful report showing tasks that are due to be completed each week.

If your team project is using milestones, the Flat View will include a Milestones column displaying the milestone each task is associated with. If a task is not projected to finish in time to meet a team commit date, this value will turn red and a tooltip will provide additional information. You may be able to resolve this problem by reordering tasks to work on the essential milestones first.

A quick way to reorder milestone tasks is to click the "Sort Tasks" button. This button offers an option to reorder the list so it begins with tasks from the first milestone, followed by tasks from the second milestone, and so on. Tasks that do not belong to any milestone will be sorted last.

For more fine-grained reordering, put your mouse over a cell in the Milestones column and check the box. The Flat View will highlight all of the tasks that need to be completed to meet that milestone, and will draw a dotted purple line indicating the milestone commit date.

Do your best to drag the failing tasks above the commit date line (or drag less urgent tasks below it). If you cannot resolve the problem by changing the order of tasks, you should talk to your team leader or planning manager about the problem. It might be necessary to reassign some of your work to another individual, or renegotiate the commit date with the customer.

The Dep column displays information about task dependencies. If you discover a dependency that was overlooked during team planning, you can double-click on this cell to add it.

The bottom half of the window displays the number of hours and minutes you plan to spend on project work for various periods of time. As your project progresses, you may find that you need to adjust these estimates as well.

It is always helpful to keep track of your personal progress, and understand your personal contributions to the team's goals. You can click the Chart button to see charts and statistics comparing your actual progress to your planned progress. For a printable version of this information, click the Report button. Your earned value schedule will appear in your web browser, and will display charts and tables comparing your actual progress to your plan. Earned value calculations will be used to forecast your actual completion date; if this differs significantly from your plan, you should bring this to the attention of your team planning manager and/or your team leader.

Near the top of this report, you will see a link that reads Show Weekly View. This weekly view displays the tasks that you have completed in the previous week, along with the tasks you had planned to complete by the end of next week. This data is very useful for planning purposes; most teams share and review this information in their weekly team meeting.

3.1.4. Managing Process Metrics (Team Member)

The Process Dashboard performs many calculations that help you track your progress and monitor the quality of the products you and your team produce. To calculate these metrics, the dashboard needs you to collect and enter some additional data.

3.1.4.1. Entering Defects

As you create documents, designs, and code, you should keep track of the defects you discover and remove from the software. To enter a defect, switch to the Process Dashboard window, use the Hierarchy Menus to navigate to the component containing the defect, and click the Defect button (). A defect dialog will appear, allowing you to describe the defect. A timer in the defect dialog makes it possible to track the amount of time it takes to fix the defect.

Reviews: If you find defects while personally reviewing a product that you created, enter the defect normally using the defect dialog, as described above.

Inspections/Peer Reviews: During the course of your project, you will often review products created by other team members. In these situations, it is very common for several people to find the same defect. If you were to enter these defects using the method described above, the dashboard would not be able to recognize the duplicated defects, and the defect would get counted twice. Because of this, defects found during inspections should be handled differently:

Your team should have a defined process for performing an inspection, which you should follow even if it differs from the steps described above. The person responsible for fixing the defects found should also enter the defect data into the dashboard.

3.1.4.2. Entering Size Data

Size metrics are extremely valuable in the analysis of historical data and the creation of future plans. Accordingly, it is important to capture size data on various artifacts as you complete them.

The first step is to measure the size. For software, the dashboard's LOC counter can help with this task.

If your personal plan contains high-maturity planning or PSP tasks, you can enter the actual size on the task's Plan Summary Form and/or Size Estimating Template.

For other components and tasks, you can enter size data by opening the WBS Editor and entering values on the Actual Size tab.

You can enter values in more than one size column for a given item. For example, the image above shows an actual size of 3 SDD pages, 12 Test Cases, and 234 lines of code for component C1. You can also enter actual sizes on parent components and their children. The image above shows 3 SDD pages for component C1, 2 for component C2, and an additional SDD page for the parent Component C (for a total of 6 pages overall).

It best to capture and enter size data as you work. But if you forgot to enter the size of some component, you can go back and enter it later (and even if the project is finished). If needed, you can also enter size data for components written by other team members.

3.1.4.2.1. Entering Size Data on Older Projects

On older projects (created with Process Dashboard 2.5 and earlier), the WBS Editor will not allow you to edit the values on the Actual Size tab. For those projects, you'll need to enter actual size data on the Project Size Inventory Form. You can open this form by selecting a task within the project, clicking the script button, and choosing "Project Size Inventory" from the menu:

The Size Inventory form will be displayed in your Web browser.

Some entries may already appear in your size inventory; when you synchronized your work breakdown structure, this information was copied from the team plan. If you find an existing entry for a document you have created, you can enter a description of the document, along with the actual finished size of the document. If the size changes due to edits in the future, you can return to this form and alter the actual size value.

You can also create new entries in this size inventory form using the hyperlinks that appear at the bottom of the page. Make certain to enter a description, choose the appropriate size units, and enter planned and actual sizes for each new entry.

You will note that the Size Units field includes options for LOC and various types of documents. If you create a document, you should pick the size metric that best describes that document. In the Actual field, enter the number of pages that you personally wrote. If several people wrote sections of a particular document, each person should make an entry in their Size Inventory form describing the sections that they wrote and the sizes of those sections. (You can use the Description field to describe the specific section of the document that you wrote.) Only enter a value in the Actual field describing portions of the document that you produced - do not enter values describing document pages written by other team members.

3.1.4.3. Reviewing Project Metrics

Project planning summary reports are available for all of the work you do on your project. You can open these plan summaries by clicking the dashboard Script button.

PSP tasks in your project hierarchy will provide familiar project plan summary forms, as defined by the PSP process.

In addition, a plan summary form is provided that displays your consolidated personal data for the entire project.

This form contains an initial set of charts and reports that you may find useful. However, you can customize this report to add other charts, reports, and metrics: just click the () icon near the top of the page. In addition, you can drill down into a different part of your project hierarchy by clicking on the () icon.

3.1.5. Team Data Collaboration

The Team Dashboard uses a peer-to-peer architecture to share data and facilitate collaboration. This unique approach offers a number of benefits:

These benefits are possible because your Process Dashboard includes a standalone database of personal metrics that is distinct from the Team Dashboard database. But since the databases are distinct, it becomes necessary to copy data back and forth periodically. These copies are performed by sync and export operations.

3.1.5.1. Synchronizing the Work Breakdown Structure

The Work Breakdown Structure offers an easy-to-edit view of the consolidated team plan. If you open the WBS from your personal dashboard and save changes, those changes will be applied to your plan automatically.

Personal plan ownership is important for a high-maturity team, so the dashboard won't modify your personal plan without your knowledge. If another member of your team makes a change to the WBS that affects you, you'll need to pull these changes into your plan. You can request these changes by performing a Sync Work Breakdown Structure operation.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. The sync client needs to copy the latest WBS data from the cloud before you can ask the Process Dashboard to sync those changes into your personal plan.

In the Process Dashboard, click the script button and choose Sync Work Breakdown Structure.

If your plan is up-to-date, you'll see a message to that effect. Otherwise, wait while the dashboard copies data from the team plan. When the operation is complete, the dashboard will display a list of the plan changes that were made.

The Sync operation updates the plan for the currently selected project. If you're a member of more than one project, you can sync the other projects by changing the active task and choosing Sync Work Breakdown Structure again.

3.1.5.2. Exporting Personal Data

The project data you collect is written in real-time into the database in your personal dashboard. But it isn't immediately available for team rollups and reports. Instead, it is published to the Team Dashboard in the background:

If you've collected data and you'd like to make it available for team reports immediately, you can perform an Export My Data Now operation.

The Export operation publishes data for the currently selected project. If you're a member of more than one project, you can export data for the other projects by changing the active task and choosing Export My Data Now again.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. Your data isn't fully exported until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.

 

3.2. Team Management (Team Leader, Managers)

As a member of the team, the team leader may need to use his or her personal Process Dashboard dataset to perform project tasks, following the general instructions provided above for all team members. In contrast, the Team Dashboard requires minimal attention and requires no data entry. When running, it provides many useful features for project planning and tracking.

3.2.1. Tracking Project Progress

3.2.1.1. Project Plan Summary

The Team Project Plan Summary is a very useful tool for tracking team progress. You can open the team plan summary by opening the Team Dashboard, selecting your team project, and choosing the "Rollup Plan Summary" option from the list on the right. The Team Rollup Plan Summary contains earned value reports for the project, quality reports and charts, and reports of overall project metrics.

The Team Rollup Plan Summary can be very helpful in weekly team meetings. There are two easy ways to view the reports during that meeting. First, you can install the Team Dashboard on a laptop computer, take that computer into the conference room for your meeting, and open the various rollup reports. Or, you can install the Quick Launcher on a computer in the conference room, bring in a data backup that you've saved from your Team Dashboard, and open that data backup in the Quick Launcher.

Also, remember that the Project Plan Summary is editable. If you don't find a particular metric or chart on your report, put the report into editing mode and add it. If you don't find the metric you're looking for in the list of provided items, please contact the Process Dashboard development team. We're always open to suggestions on how to make the dashboard better!

3.2.1.2. Earned Value Reports

The Team Rollup Plan Summary includes earned value reports for the project. These reports roll up the individual earned value plans owned by each team member into a single earned value plan for the entire team.

Near the top of the team earned value report, you will find a Show Weekly View hyperlink. Clicking this hyperlink will display a chronological cross section of the project schedule that summarizes the accomplishments of the previous week and lists the tasks scheduled to be completed in the coming week. This is very useful in the weekly team meeting. For monitoring and status reporting on longer projects, a monthly view is also available.

Once the team has collected a minimum amount of earned value data, these earned value reports will include forecasts for overall project cost and completion date. You will notice that the team earned value plan typically includes two different forecasts for the project completion date.

Practically speaking, it is rarely possible to keep the workload perfectly balanced, so a realistic forecast completion date would fall between the two dates provided above. When the two forecast dates differ significantly, the project workload is unbalanced and tasks likely need to be reassigned.

At times, you may need to drill down into the earned value schedule for a particular team member. To do this, open Team Dashboard window and select Task and Schedule from the File menu. Open the schedule for the team project. If you highlight the sub-schedule for a particular individual, you can choose "Filtered Chart" or "Filtered Report" from the "View" menu to see graphical, statistical, and printable views of that individual's earned value plan.

Many teams find it useful to track their progress against a baseline. If you forgot to save a baseline at the end of your project launch, you can possibly recover one by opening the project Task & Schedule window and choosing "Tools → Manage Baselines/Snapshots." This will show a list of snapshots the Team Dashboard has saved automatically over time. Select a snapshot that was saved shortly after your launch finished, and click "Make Active" to make it the official baseline.

3.2.1.3. Project Data Scanner

High-maturity project teams collect a lot of data. This data can be very valuable for project tracking, analysis, and process improvement; but at times, the sheer volume of data can be difficult to sift through. The Project Data Scanner report aims to help with this task.

The Project Data Scanner report analyzes team project data to look for common problems and highlight opportunties for improvement. Coaches, team leaders, and quality coordinators can use this report to gain insight into the project and to identify data problems.

When the Project Data Scanner report identifies potential data problems, it displays them in a list for review. The coach, team leader or quality manager can look over these lists periodically. When a particular finding has been reviewed and handled, the responsible individual can mark the checkbox on that line to clear the item from the report.

In the current release of the dashboard, the Project Data Scanner report includes several useful analyses; but many more are possible. If you have an idea for a new process data check, send a suggestion to the Process Dashboard development team so it can be added in a future release.

3.2.1.4. Analyzing Filtered Data Using Labels

Although the project planning summary allows you to drill down into subcomponents in your team plan, sometimes you will have a need to analyze a subset of data that slices across those hierarchical boundaries. To support this need, the dashboard has a powerful feature for analyzing arbitrary subsets of team data based on keywords called "labels."

Labels can be associated with tasks using the Work Breakdown Structure editor. During the team launch, you may not wish to spend the entire team's time entering these labels. But after the launch is complete, you might want to open the WBS and attach keywords to various tasks. This can be done by entering values in the "Task Labels" column on the "Task Details" tab. Each task can have any number of labels, separated by commas or spaces. Tasks will inherit the labels of their WBS parent unless you request otherwise.

If you use labels extensively, you may find that the Labels column becomes cluttered with keywords for many different categories. In this case, it is wise to create custom columns for each independent categorization. As you define the custom column, check the box to "Show values as labels in team reports." This will allow you to filter team charts and reports based on the values in the column. When you use this approach, the Labels column can be used primarily for one-off keywords.

After you edit labels and save the Work Breakdown Structure, you can apply a label filter from any page of your Team Project Plan Summary. To apply a label filter, click the filter icon that appears at the top of the plan summary page (). A form will be displayed, prompting you for the label filter expression you wish to use. The syntax of this expression is similar to familiar search engines like Google; the form includes an explanation of the syntax.

When you apply the label filter, all the metrics you see in your customized forms, charts, and reports will be filtered to include only the tasks that match your filter expression. In addition to the labels that you enter in the WBS, the filter expression can also include:

3.2.1.5. Analyzing Filtered Data Using Groups

The people collaborating on a project can often be categorized in various ways. For example, you might have:

The Team Dashboard allows you to define arbitrary groups to describe these collections of people. To do this, choose "Edit Groups" from the "Tools" menu.

The group editor will appear, allowing you to add, copy, rename, and delete groups. If you highlight the name of a group on the left, you can select the individuals who should be included in the group on the right. The names on the right side are taken from the list of people who have joined projects in this Team Dashboard.

Once groups have been defined, you can filter your view of the Team Dashboard to show data pertaining to a given group. Just click the group selector that appears in the top right corner of the main Team Dashboard window. The tree will narrow to show projects that the given individuals are participating in. To remove the filter, click the group selector and choose "Everyone" (the default initial value).

After you select a group, that filter will be inherited by other windows and reports that you open. For example, if you open the Project Task & Schedule window, it will only show earned value data from people in the selected group. And if you open a report like the Project Plan Summary, the sums will only show data from people in the selected group. You can change the active filter dynamically by clicking the group selector at the top of a particular window or report. This can be extremely useful as a way to monitor project progress for a particular subteam, reporting unit, etc.

Group filters should not be used to view data for a single individual, since that would be a violation of TSP data privacy ethics. Accordingly, the Team Dashboard reports perform a check to see whether a given group filter would predominately display data for a single individual. If so, the data in the report will be censored to protect that individual's data privacy.

3.2.2. Managing the Team Plan

3.2.2.1. Reassigning Tasks

Workload balancing is an important part of team project management. When you determine that you need to reassign tasks, take these steps.

  1. Select the team project in the team dashboard, and choose Work Breakdown Structure Editor from the list on the right.
  2. On the Team menu, turn on the "Show Team Time Balancing Panel" option. After individuals have begun collecting actual data for the project, the colored balancing bars will update to reflect planned time remaining. You can use the colored bars to balance the remaining work, and their end dates will roughly correspond to the "Replan" dates in each team members earned value schedule.
  3. Switch to the Task Time tab of the Work Breakdown Structure Editor. Edit values in the Assigned To column to reassign the task(s) in question. You can reassign tasks in an entire branch of the WBS by changing Assigned To initials on a parent node. Save the changes and close the Work Breakdown Structure Editor.
  4. If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure your cloud provider's sync client is running and active. Your WBS changes will not be fully saved until the sync client reports that all files are published and up-to-date.
  5. Any team member who was affected by the change should take the following steps:
    1. Follow the instructions in the Synchronize Work Breakdown Structure help topic. The synchronization logic will display a list of items added; review this list to ensure that the expected changes were made.
    2. Open your earned value plan in the Task and Schedule dialog. For each newly assigned task, enter your best estimate of the task time remaining in the Planned Time (PT) column.

3.2.2.2. Reviewing Changes in the Team Plan

Throughout the course of the project, teams will frequently refine their plan based on newly available information. As a result, the team plan will change continually over time. Reviewing and monitoring these changes is an important part of project management and tracking, so two review methods are provided.

For a quick and simple review, choose "WBS Change History Report" from the Team Dashboard. This will display a chronological report showing:

You may find it useful to review the contents of this report in preparation for your weekly team meeting, or during the meeting itself.

For a more detailed review of changes, open the WBS Editor and choose "Highlight and Review Changes" from the "File" menu. This will invite you to select a date in the past; then it will find changes that have occurred in the team plan since that date. The WBS Editor will display a triangular annotation in the top-left corner of each modified cell. If you select one of these annotated cells, a floating window will show you the history of how that cell has changed over time, along with the name of the individual who made each change.

You can use the arrow buttons to move from one change to the next. If you discover something worrisome or problematic, you can click the red "X" to bring the problem to the team's attention.

3.2.2.3. Bringing Problems to the Team's Attention

While reviewing data, you may sometimes discover problems with the plan or with actual data. For example, an inspection might be done but one team member forgot to mark it complete. Or an individual might have marked a PSP task complete without entering any actual size data. You can annotate these problems by switching to the Task Details tab and entering a value in the Data Problems column.

When a note is entered into the Data Problems column:

The presence of a note in the Data Problems column will not have any effect on team rollups or earned value calculations. This column is strictly a communications tool to facilitate the job of coaches, quality managers, team leaders, etc. When the problem has been resolved, you can clear the error flag by deleting the note from the Data Problems column.

3.2.2.4. Exploring What-if scenarios

During the launch, the team creates a comprehensive plan. But change is inevitable, and at times you may be asked to explore the impact of a major plan change. For example, stakeholders might want to know the schedule impact of a significant change in scope. Or management might need to know the project impact that would result from gaining or losing team members.

To explore these "what-if" scenarios, choose "Save a Copy" from the "File" menu of the WBS Editor. You can explore changes in this copy without corrupting the real team plan.

For more information on this feature, see the help topic on exploring alternative plans.

3.2.2.5. Preparing for Project Relaunch

Most projects use an iterative development approach. In the Team Dashboard, the recommended best practice is to create a new Team Project to represent each successive project iteration. To assist with this task, a special "Relaunch Wizard" is provided.

The team leader or planning manager should generally run the Relaunch Wizard just before the team's project relaunch meeting. To do this, open the Team Dashboard, select the just-finished project from the list on the left, and choose "File → Alter Project → Relaunch." The Team Project Relaunch Wizard will open in your web browser.

Read each page of the relaunch wizard carefully and provide the information requested. The relaunch wizard will:

After the relaunch wizard finishes, each team member should:

  1. Open their personal dashboard
  2. Accept or decline the invitation to join the new project iteration.
  3. Perform a "sync to WBS" operation for the old project iteration. This will clean up their old plan so its earned value schedule is 100% complete.

These actions will happen automatically for most team members. But if a particular individual left the project at some time in the past, you may need to contact them and ask them to take these steps so the tasks in the their old plan are properly closed.

Most teams will also like to view view end-to-end project data that spans all of the iterations of the project. A Master Project meets this need. If you are just beginning your second iteration, you should create a Master Project and add both project iterations to this master. If you have already been using a master project, just add the new project iteration to the existing master project.

3.2.2.6. Closing a Project

When a project is finished or cancelled, your team will often hold a retrospective to review project data and collect lessons learned. As part of this effort, you may wish to mark the project as "closed." This can be done by selecting the project from the list on the left, and choosing "File → Alter Project → Close." This will display a page in your web browser explaining the implications of closing the project, and prompting for confirmation.

3.2.3. Managing Team Data

3.2.3.1. Importing/Exporting Data

During the project, the individual dashboard datasets belonging to each team member export metrics data to the shared team directory. This exported data is then imported into the team dashboard to calculate rolled up team data.

This export/import mechanism is generally fully automatic. The individual dashboards automatically export their data each night, and each time they are shut down. The team dashboard checks for new data every ten minutes, and imports any new data it finds. As a result, you generally will not need to interact with the export/import mechanism.

At times, however, you may wish to have a team member correct a piece of erroneous data and quickly see the change reflected in the team rollup. At these times, you can ask the individual to select Export My Data Now from the script menu in their personal dashboard. Once their export is complete, you can select Import All Data Now from the list of tools on the right pane of the team dashboard.

If your team is using cloud storage for team data, make sure all team members are actively running the cloud provider's sync client. Data will only flow between computers after the sync client copies files to the cloud and back.

In addition, if you are using task dependencies to coordinate work between individuals, then you should open the team dashboard at least once daily. This will allow the team dashboard to recompute the completion status of dependent tasks, and communicate this data to the individual dashboards.

3.2.3.2. Backing Up Project Data

Over the course of the project, you should periodically save a backup of the data in the Team Dashboard (saving a backup each week is recommended). Just choose File → Save Data Backup from the main Team Dashboard window.

The data backup will contain data for all of the projects in this Team Dashboard, so it isn't necessary to save separate backups for each project. If you retain these backups, you can open them later in the Quick Launcher to see a historical view of project progress.

3.2.3.3. Using the Quick Launcher

When you install the Process Dashboard, it creates a shortcut that opens your own personal dashboard dataset (and possibly a second shortcut to open the team dashboard). Sometimes, however, you need to look at data from a different dashboard. For example, the quality manager may need to look at data collected by a single individual, or the team coach may need to view the team plan from a remote location. The Quick Launcher makes this possible. If you select the Tools for Team Leaders option during installation, a Process Dashboard Quick Launcher shortcut will be created for your use.

Individuals can create data backup files by opening their personal dashboard and choosing " → Tools → Save Data Backup." In the Team Dashboard, this option appears on the File menu. You can drag-and-drop one of these data backup files onto the Quick Launcher window, and a team or personal dashboard window will open, displaying the data exactly as it appeared when the backup was made.

If you do not have a Quick Launcher shortcut, you can open a data backup by choosing " → Tools → Open Dataset" from a personal dashboard, or by choosing "File → Open Dataset" from a Team Dashboard. Then select the data backup file you would like to open.

For more information on the creation and use of data backups, see the data backup help topic.

3.2.4. Analyzing Process Metrics

Workflows provide a powerful way for teams to define custom processes and use them in their work. The dashboard provides a number of reports that analyze workflow process data.

3.2.4.1. Current Project Workflow Metrics

To view workflow data from a single project, select that project on the left side of the Team Dashboard window. Then click the Rollup Plan Summary option on the right.

The Rollup Plan Summary report will open in your web browser. When it does, click the "Workflow Summary" link from the report navigation pane. This will show a list of workflows that are in use by the current project. Choose a workflow to display planned and actual metrics for the corresponding components in this project.

By default, this report will include data from all components in the given project that use the selected workflow. For example, it will include data from components that have been planned but yet started. You can use the filtering tools at the top of the page to customize this behavior. To view "To Date" data from completed components only, see the next section.

Note: the "Workflow Summary" section was added in Process Dashboard version 2.5. If your team customized the Rollup Plan Summary using an earlier version of the dashboard, your customized report might not include a "Workflow Summary" section. In that case, you will need to edit the report again and add a "Workflow Summary" item.

3.2.4.2. To Date Workflow Metrics

To analyze "to date" data from various workflows, select the "Workflow Process Analysis" item from the list on the right side of the Team Dashboard window.

When the list of project workflows is displayed in your web browser, click the name of a particular workflow to see aggregate metrics.

The "Workflow Process Analysis" report rolls up data from all the WBS components that used this workflow and that are 100% complete. By default it will roll up all component data from all of the projects in the Team Dashboard, but you can click the Filter link at the top to customize this behavior.

The resulting report displays a number of charts and metrics, such as:

These metrics are extremely useful for ongoing quality monitoring, and for end-of-cycle postmortem analysis.

3.2.4.3. Configuring Workflow Mappings

Historical data is extremely valuable for planning, tracking, and analysis. So when you view the Workflow Process Analysis report for a given project, the dashboard will pull in data from other projects if they include a workflow with the same name and steps. For example, if several of your project cycles all have a workflow named "SW Development," and those workflows contain steps with the same names as the current workflow, then data from all of these matching steps will be included in the calculations for the Workflow Process Analysis report.

But at times, this simple name-based matching is insufficient. For example, if your team changes the name of a workflow or alters the steps inside, the names will no longer match, and the historical data will not map forward anymore. Fortunately, you can resolve these issues by telling the dashboard how workflows map to each other.

To view or edit workflow mappings, open the Workflow Process Analysis report for the workflow you are interested in, then click the "Configuration..." link at the top of the page. On the configuration page, click the link to configure workflow mappings. This will open a page that shows mappings for the workflow in question.

The workflow of interest is shown at the top of the page. The brown boxes on the left below show other other workflows whose data is currently being included in the analysis. For symmetry, the blue boxes on the right show other workflows that include data from the current workflow. Click on any of these boxes, and you will see how the steps map from one workflow to another. To change these, click the "Edit Mappings" button at the bottom. If you wish to map data in the opposite direction as well, click the "Reverse Mappings" button and make changes as needed.

Workflow mappings are transitive: so if Workflow A maps to Workflow B, and Workflow B maps to Workflow C, then Worklow A data will automatically be included in analyses for Workflow C. When you add a new mapping between two previously unrelated workflows, the top-level mapping graph will automatically display any new transitive relationships.

After you have manually added or edited mappings, the workflow relationships shown on the top-level mapping graph will fall into two broad categories:

Since these relationships behave differently, it is important to be aware of the distinction. Accordingly, the top-level mapping graph will use thicker lines to indicate explicit mappings. If you edit a mapping between two workflows and need to change it later, take note of the thicker lines so you can make your follow-on edits to the same workflow pair you edited originally.

Here are some practical examples of how your team might use workflow mappings:

Process Evolution:

Similar Workflows:

Cross-cutting Analysis:

3.2.5. Managing Permissions and Privacy

The reports and tools in the Team Dashboard are designed to support self-directed teams, and to strike a balance between openness and data privacy. For many teams, the default settings work very well. But when projects become larger, and when you are required to share data with people outside the team, you may find it useful to control who can see and edit certain types of data. The Team Dashboard includes a role-based access framework for this purpose.

3.2.5.1. Editing Roles

Roles represent a set of responsibilities and permissions that can be granted to individuals. To edit roles, choose "Edit Roles" from the "Tools" menu on the main Team Dashboard window.

This will open a window for editing roles:

Roles can be added, duplicated, renamed, and deleted using the buttons above the list.

With a role highlighted, you can add and delete permissions for the role using the buttons on the right. Clicking the Add button displays a list of available permissions:

Permissions are hierarchical. When you select a permission to add, its children are given a light blue highlight as a visual clue that they will be implicitly granted too. If desired, you can select "All Dashboard Permissions" to grant all permissions to a coach, team lead, or other role.

Most permissions are either granted or not; but some permissions have extra parameters. If you add a parameterizable permission, you will see an extra prompt to configure the value of the parameter:

After adding one of these parameterizable permissions, you can change the value of the parameter by highlighting it in the roles window and clicking the Edit button.

If you have been editing a role and you make a mistake, you can click the Revert button. This replaces the list of permissions for this role with the values that were in place before you opened the Roles Editor.

When you are finished with your edits, you can save them by clicking OK. If you click Cancel, your edits will be discarded.

3.2.5.2. Editing Users

After roles have been defined, you can assign these roles to users by choosing "Edit Users" from the Team Dashboard "Tools" menu.

This opens a window for editing the list of users:

This window provides elements to search for users, to toggle the display of inactive users, to add and delete users, and to view/edit a table of details for each user. Clicking OK saves your changes, clicking Cancel discards them.

The "Active?" column determines whether an individual will be allowed to open the Team Dashboard. Removing the checkmark will disallow the given user from opening the Team Dashboard.

The Roles column in the table allows you to choose the roles that should be assigned to a user. A given user can have more than one role; just separate the role names with commas. Users will receive all of the permissions of all the roles they have been granted. Is is also permissable not to assign any role at all, which would leave a user with the most limited privileges possible.

The table header for the Roles column includes a "help" icon. If you click this icon, a role definition report will be displayed in your web browser. This report displays all of the roles that have been defined, along with the permissions they contain; this can be helpful for deciding which roles a given user should be granted.

The first row of the table sets permissions for people whose usernames are not explicitly listed. Clearing the "Active" checkmark will prevent unlisted people from opening this Team Dashboard. Leaving the row "Active" and assigning zero or more roles will allow unlisted people to open this Team Dashboard, but be constrained by the permissions of the associated roles.

When you highlight a particular user, you can click the "View" button to see the effective list of permissions that user has been granted, as a result of their assigned role or roles:

Permission grants are enforced equally when someone opens a Team Dashboard data backup in the Quick Launcher. As a result, you can prevent unlisted people from opening your team's data backups, or you can control the types of data they are able to see. This means that you should consider external people (like remote coaches) when you are listing users and configuring permissions.

3.2.5.3. Permission Grant Latency

If you make changes that affect your own permissions in the WBS Editor, these permissions will not take effect until you close and reopen the WBS Editor.

For most Team-Dashboard-related permissions, you can make a change to users/roles and see the change right away. The exceptions are the permissions for editing users and roles. If you make a change that would remove your own ability to edit users/roles, the change will not be applied until you close and reopen the Team Dashboard. This gives you a "grace period" to recover from mistakes. If you do edit away your ability to change users/roles, a warning will be displayed:

3.2.5.4. Data Privacy

Many of the available permissions control whether a person is allowed to do something, or whether they are allowed to edit a particular type of data. But another class of permissions relates to data privacy.

Data privacy is an extremely important consideration for TSP teams, because the data that individuals collect is very sensitive. The data provides excellent opportunities for project management and process improvement, but can be dangerous if misused.

3.2.5.4.1. Data Privacy Considerations

The following drivers underscore the need for effective data privacy:

The desires of the individual - the individuals who are collecting and sharing their data have specific expectations about who will be allowed see it, and how it will be used. To the greatest extent possible, we strive to honor these expectations. We also strive to provide transparency to users about who can see their data, to inspire trust.

Laws and regulations - data privacy laws govern the use of data collected by individuals in the EU.

Customer/stakeholder business relations - certain metrics are sensitive and should not be seen by a customer or stakeholder, as this could damage the business relationship. For example, awareness of detailed cost/productivity data could lead a customer to demand smaller profit margins on future contracts. For external customers, this risk can be managed via selective release of status data to customers; but when the customer/stakeholder happens to be within the same organization as the team doing the work, data privacy controls come into play.

Protection from mismanagement - certain metrics are especially prone to improper use by management:

If personal metrics are ever used as a basis for reward or punishment, individuals will change their behavior and begin collecting metrics that make them look good. When this occurs, the metrics are no longer useful for reward/punishment; but they also cease to be useful for project management or process improvement. A single occurrence of this problem within an organization is enough to damage trust and destroy a process improvement initiative. Organizations can mitigate this risk with continual management education and diligence; but not all organizations are successful, and cultural differences make this a huge problem in certain parts of the world.

3.2.5.4.2. Competing Needs

Of course, data privacy needs must be balanced with a set of competing needs for openness:

There are a number of ways we can meet these needs; but to the greatest extent possible, we strive to meet them with the smallest data privacy exposure.

3.2.5.4.3. Spheres of Data Ownership

The following broad categories of data deserve separate analysis:

My Personal Data   Another Individual's Personal Data   Rollups for a User Group   Team Rollups

My Personal Data is always available to an individual within their personal Process Dashboard.

Team Rollups are always available in the Team Dashboard, to anyone who has been granted Team Dashboard access.

Rollups for a User Group are available in the Team Dashboard, subject to a set of data privacy controls that prevent generating a report of data for a single individual.

Another Individual's Personal Data is the sphere of primary importance for data privacy. Personal data is currently available in the Team Dashboard via the following mechanisms:

3.2.5.4.4. Data Privacy Permissions

To meet the needs described above, the dashboard provides a number of permissions allowing you to control whether an individual can see certain types of (potentially sensitive) data. The items in the "View Personal Data" portion of the permissions tree all fall into this category.

When you grant these permissions to a role, you can grant the permission for "Everyone," or for a particular user group:

If you wish to grant permission to view data in several different groups, you can add the permission more than once, and select a different group each time.

The default configuration of the Team Dashboard grants "All Permissions" to "All Users." This means that no special data privacy constraints are enforced by default. This is often appropriate for many teams, because the built-in reports are already designed to limit the exposure of personal data. But if your team determines that additional protection is warranted, data privacy permissions can be selectively granted to those users who have a "need to know."