Projectory Configuration Tips

Users

Users in Projectory are easy to set up and manage. Individuals log in using their full name and can manage all of their account details themselves. The interface is streamlined to minimize the time and effort required to effectively use the software: each user has a main page with links to all of the functions and reports that they are allowed to access, and a user is never more than two clicks away from any given functionality.

User Groups

Each user account is associated with one or more user groups, with access to functionality that's appropriate for that group. You define the groups and the associated functionality through the Projectory web interface. This gives you the ability to mirror your organizational structure and roles within Projectory itself. If your development team consists of developers, team leads, and project managers, you can define each of these as a group and decide exactly what functionality you want each group to have access to.

Teams

All users should be assigned to one or more teams. Teams can be permanent or ad-hoc, and can be set to active or inactive. Membership in a team determines which projects users have access to.

Projects

Projects are the containers for all of the work that is tracked in Projectory. Projects have one or more associated activities (e.g. Analysis, Documentation, or Development) and are associated with one or more teams. Members of teams have access to all projects associated with teams that they belong to.

Careful definition of projects can allow you to track planned vs. unplanned work and derive good metrics about the overall effort expended across your development teams. For example, defining bug fixes as a project available to all development teams lets you determine how much effort your teams are putting into maintenance as opposed to new development.

Activities

Activities are high-level categories that define the sort of work that is associated with projects. Since activities are defined outside of projects, and should be applicable across multiple projects, these are not necessarily the line items that you would find on a project plan. Activities are best understood as descriptions of general classes of work. For example, "Release Management" and "Unit Testing" are apppropriate activities, but "Release version 1.3 to production" and "Test view/edit/delete interfaces for client records" are too specific.

Work Entries

Individual users enter the hours spent on various activities across their active projects by completing a work entry. The work entry form lists all projects and project activities associated with teams to which the user belongs. Users enter the time spent on each activity and may add comments if desired.

The work entry form makes it easy to move between days in a given week, or forward and backward in time. The form only displays one day at a time, however, so it's most efficient if developers enter their work entries daily. This has the added benefit of ensuring that the information entered is more recent and therefore more accurate.