Requesting Approval for a Project
Ellen has decided that there is no need to physically bring the steering committee together for this small project. Instead she will add the necessary information to justify the project to the project record. That should allow the steering committee members to provide their approval without the need to wait for a time when everyone is available for a meeting.
Before asking the steering committee members for their approval, add a note to the project with the following information:
This project is necessary because 4 months from now the NNM v8 software will no longer be supported by HP. Version 10 of NNM (the latest version) has some useful new features that are expected to reduce the number of outages by roughly 5%. That should reduce the yearly downtime costs by approximately $18,000.
In addition, the improved automation capabilities of the new version should allow us to reduce the number of events that require a manual action by 10%, saving Widget Data Center roughly $4,000 per year.
By adding this information as a note to the project, it will automatically be included in the project summary that is attached as a PDF to the approval task when it is assigned to the steering committee.
Complete your task for preparing the steering committee meeting. This causes the approval task for the steering committee members to be assigned.
Question:
Now that the approval task is assigned, why are there 4 PDFs attached to it?
A PDF with a summary of the project is automatically generated for each approver as soon as the status of the approval task is set to ‘Assigned’. A separate PDF is generated for each approver to ensure that the dates and times are presented in the approver’s time zone and to ensure that the information (with the exception of the free text) appears in the preferred language of the approver.
Because the approval task has 4 approvers, the project manager can see all 4 of these project summaries. Each approver is only able to see the summary that was specifically prepared for him/her.
Note that the information that is included in a project summary PDF can be customized by an administrator of the organization’s 4me account. This is done in the ‘PDF Designs’ section of the Settings console.