CASE STUDIES : Project Management System Creation

 

One of the key stones of project management environment for any outsourcing company is effective project management system. Being an offshore outsourcing company with 100+ employees we need to ensure careful management of projects and resources. The primary goals set for the system are the following: accountable time for projects/resources, multi-level authorized access rights, project reporting and tracking, clean and easy-to-use user interface.

Our management and development teams sorted a line of different open source solutions for project management and selected “Dotproject” (http://dotproject.net) as the main platform for the project management system. It provides benefits not only as a flexible web based project management platform but also as a scalable solution allowing further customizations and improvements.

The developed solution has 3 access levels: project worker, project manager and administrative level. Each level has its own features, for instance a project worker can only work on the projects and tasks that were assigned to him, at the same time a project manager can modify/work on projects that they were assigned to.

Another feature (time-sheets) provides each of the company’s employees with a timetable sheet reflecting the history of projects accomplished during the working period, the time spent on every task and total hours per selected time frame. Also, timetable includes additional options like free time, time on hold and overtime. That allows gathering information about person’s performance for billing and reporting.

The whole system was redesigned with easy front-end usage in mind, so AJAX functionality is used were applicable.

A lot of optimization work was accomplished to tune up the standard code of Dotproject so as to allow handling high load/usage of the system.

Each company uses an effective web based project management application on a daily basis, which provides not only for regular project management options, but also for analytics statistics which allow management to make appropriate corrections, analyze performance per person and per department, as well as collaborate more effectively within the company.

• Multi-level access to the system;

• Time-sheets for employees;

• Analytics module which provides the ability to gather project information, compare the performance, archive and use different types of reports and statistics;

• More attractive user interface and usability.