Project Workspaces
From Projectivity Documentation
Project Workspaces are used to manage projects according to well defined Project Management Methods.
When a Project is created the defined framework enforces a common structure that makes Project Management easy and effective.
A Project is composed in turn by sub-workspaces that can be:
- Dynamic that model activities
- Folder that group workspaces
Dynamic Workspaces have a set of predefined attributes that allow Projectivity to keep track of the activity status. Those status attributes are:
- Start date - when the activity starts
- End date - when the activity ends
- Completion Status - the percentage of the activity completion
- Forecasted Man Days - the effort needed to complete the activity, expressed in man-days
The following figures show an easy to understand project workspaces structure and its related Gantt diagram. In the diagram the workspaces PreGame and Development are Folders, Sprint 1 and Sprint 2 are dynamic, where JPRS 1.0 is a project. Projectivity automatically calculates the status attributes of the project (and folders) on the basis of nested dynamic workspaces.
For instance, the start date of Development and JPRS 1.0 is the start date of the nested earliest activity (in this case, it is the Sprint 1) and its completion is calculated taking into account the completion attributes of the nested activities (weighed on the basis of the forecasted man days attributes).
For the Project Management point of view, the Workspace tree structure of a Project represents the Work Breakdown Structure while the Gantt diagram gives the same information (how the project is decomposed) by adding the temporal dimension.
The framework used in the example enforces a simple structure on the project: it has to be decomposed in PreGame and Development (of type folder) and the latter in 1 or more Sprint (of type dynamic). Some of you may recognize that this is what the Agile Scrum method dictates.
A significant difference between Dynamics and other types of Workpaces (Structural and Folder) is that the available work time of a resource that is assigned to a dynamic workspace is "consumed" by it.
"Project Management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources (e.g. people) in such a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints. A project is a temporary and one-time endeavour undertaken to create a unique product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value. This property of being a temporary and one-time undertaking contrasts with processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent ongoing functional work to create the same product or service over and over again." (definition from Wikipedia)
