Author: Curt Doolittle

OVERSING UPDATE

Revising the update because it turns out my concern over permissions on workflows is incorrect. Why? Because it’s not uncommon for the devs to be smarter than I am. 🙂

The organizational workflows (stuff in the organization) are governed by the Access Role permissions and you change them via the operations menu. The Task workflows (stuff within programs and projects) are governed by the program administration permission, and you change them as part of program->settings->Workflows.

So workflow-specific permissions are a ‘nice to have’ not a necessity. Why? well, when you create a new object in oversing, it looks through your org tree and takes the closest one. I would like this to be permission driven so that different groups in the same organization would ‘find’ different system workflows. We also have ‘weights’ that we can apply to these workflows but we haven’t exposed that in the UI yet. I want to see if we can do without it by using permissions.

REMAINING OPEN ISSUES IN PRIORITY ORDER

2) (EASY) Drag and Drop to move to Schedule State / Right Click to Schedule State (long standing issue. Always seems to get moved to lower priority. But it’s necessary.) We had quite a bit of debate over this because we don’t want the schedule state to be invasive or to add complexity since it isn’t necessary. So we decided on a compromise, and that is that we separate out the scheduling features into their own ‘block’ on the Tasks panel, and we don’t integrate the scheduling sub-phase into the Main Sequence: Backlog, To-Do(Active), Done.

7) (EASY) Still missing ability to select for organizations and display Program Statistics in the Tasks Panel. All tasks roll up to parent tasks. And yes, we flatten the data so that we aren’t querying hierarchies all the time. That means that we can show just the Program, project, or deliverable ‘rows’ and that they will reflect the data underneath them without requiring that we display all rows. So, in the tasks view you can easily see a worldwide operation’s active programs and report on them without having to expose the detail of each program.

6) (EASY) Minor Fixes to Forecasting and Responsibilities. (forecasts should be outer-joined on operational periods, so that we know what’s there and what’s missing) (responsibilities are your ‘inbox’ for workflow activity. and we need some minor tweaks to the table view.) Note: In the future, this panel will switch between email and responsibilities when we add email integration.)

3) (PAINFUL AND TIME CONSUMING) Display Appointments on the Gantt Chart. (long standing issue) (It’s hard to know what resourcing needs your attention without this feature. We are saving this for last because we find working with this bit of source code time consuming.)

4) (TIME CONSUMING) Cascading changes to the schedule when we delete dependencies are still not working correctly. I am not sure why this remains an issue.

5) (TIME CONSUMING) Add the accounting,payroll,operational period properties and functions. This is technically the ‘last feature’, because all it does is allow you to configure the lifecycle of when you allow submissions of different financial activity, and when you post and close it. I have no estimate on this but I suspect it’s a three week effort at the outside. I’m worried that the number of transaction touch points is high, and that it’s hard to test, so that is why despite being fairly simple (creating events), I am cautious about time.