Creating a New Project
In your inbox you will find request #704860 with the subject ‘Upgrade HP OpenView NNM to v10 (NNM10)’. This request has been assigned to Ellen by Ellen’s manager Howard Tanner. Read through the note that Howard included in the request to understand what is requested.
Questions:
Can the software upgrade be performed by change enablement, without the involvement of project management?
At the Widget Data Center the thresholds beyond which project management is required are:
- more than 10 workdays of internal effort, or
- more than $10K of purchases.
When you go to the Settings console (the 5th toolbar button) and open the section ‘Project Categories’, you will see these thresholds defined in the project category ‘Small – Less than 50 workdays and $50K’.
Because the charges from HP alone already exceed $10K, Howard does not first need change enablement to determine that the NNM software upgrade needs project management. That is why he is asking Ellen to open a new project straight away.
Does this mean that project management can bypass change enablement?
When a project requires a change to be implemented (e.g. for preparing a new virtual server), the project manager should still ask the appropriate workflow manager to open a new change workflow for this. The new workflow can then be included by linking it to the project.
Changes in Xurrent are called Workflows and change enablement is implemented by Workflow Management. Although the term 'change' is common within IT organizations, it is much less common for support domains such as Human Resources (HR), Finance, Legal, Facilities and Marketing, that typically do not come from an ITIL background. For them, the term 'workflow' is much more intuitive. Since the strength of Xurrent lies in seamlessly connecting all these domains, this naming improves the collaboration between these departments.
Request #704860 asks Ellen to register a new project. Do this from the request by clicking on the Actions toolbar button and selecting the option ‘Relate to New Project…’
You will see that the subject for the new project is obtained from the Subject field of the request. The service is also automatically set using the information from the request. In the Program field, select ‘Data Center Improvements’ and select ‘Widget Data Center, External IT’ as the customer for the project. The option ‘Compliance’ can be selected as the justification for the project.
Before a category can be selected, you will first need to estimate the internal effort and the total cost of purchases. So, for now, leave the Category field empty.
Questions:
Do you have an idea how Xurrent identified which work hours to link to the project?
Xurrent checks the work hours of the team that the person who created the project is a member of (if this person belongs to more than one team, Xurrent will use an algorithm to identify the the most suitable team). In this example Ellen Brown belongs to the Operations team, so the work hours of the Operations team are applied. The project manager can still override the default selection when that is needed.
Why do you think the work hours are important?
The work hours of a project are used to schedule the tasks. The completion target of each task is calculated using the task’s planned duration and the project’s work hours.
Save your project. Once it is saved, its status should be ‘Registered’ and its completion target should show up as ‘To Be Planned’.
Question:
What is the status of Howard’s request?
The request that Howard submitted for this project is now related to the project. This caused the status of this request to be updated to ‘Project Pending’, which indicates that a project is being worked on to fulfill the requirements.
Requests with the status ‘Project Pending’ no longer show up in the Inbox console to avoid people working on project tasks while someone else is duplicating this effort by working on the request.