Clarity

Greetings, fellow community members!

I am looking into how Clarity really works when you set up task-level dependencies across projects. I could use some feedback from others who know more about this than I do, or who are using Clarity to manage Agile projects.

I understand how you can manage constraints on these dependencies, but how can this be used to report on the COST or EFFORT on these tasks?

Here is the context:

Let's say we have a project "A" that is more of a "Product" where developers book time to tasks (which are really user stories). Each of these tasks (u/s) are being funded by other projects. We are looking for ways that the funding projects can get visibility to the effort and cost of these tasks, without assigning all of the development resources to all of these various other projects ... making their timesheets as long as their leg.

A "theory" was that perhaps we can use the task dependencies functionality to "link" the user story tasks to something related in another project. The only problem is, from what I can tell so far, the only information that shows on the other project are the dates and status of the task ... not the hours or cost.

It would be nice if there was a way the other projects (B) could get visibility to the effort, hours and cost that is being tracked via timesheets to project A in order to simplify and improve accuracy on time tracking!

Anyone have thoughts, suggestions, or recommendations?

Thanks,
Lori Hagewood

Hi All,

I know someone out there wants to jump in and give Lori a hand. Don't be bashful!

Thanks!
Chris

I haven't fully thought through what you are after; but if you manage your "tasks" (user stories) as individual "clarity projects" (rather than as seperate "clarity tasks" within a larger "clarity project"), then you can add those discrete "clarity u/s projects" as subprojects under any other "clarity project" and see the rollup of effort etc in the project hierarchy screens?

Thanks, Dave for your input.

We actually have potentially a unique situation, whereby a single project may have user stories (or tasks) being requested by many other projects. The linkage is really at the task level versus a project (or larger entity of many tasks) so not sure that approach would work for us.

I'm guessing not many people are using task-to-task dependencies across projects using the tool. We're looking at Agile Vision as a potential solution, so perhaps we'll just continue down that path!
:girl:

Thanks!
Lori

I think there are 2 things you are discussing;

1. Inter-project (task-to-task) dependencies - these are really common, we use these all over the place to make tasks in one plan (or many plans) dependant upon tasks in other plans (typically linked through milestones)

2. "rollup" of task information - this doesn't have anything to do with dependencies (unfortunately for you!?!).

What I suggested above was a way to organise your Clarity-project plans in order to deliver something that solves #2 - Clarity itself just solves #1 whatever you do.

My suggestion is really just about the granularity of what you call a "project" in Clarity (its one of my big hobby-horses about what is a "project" - in Clarity terms a "project" is just a "plan" - in business terms a "project" is typically a whole load of Clarity plans all joined up somehow "cleverly").

There is nothing stopping you creating (multiple) task-to-task dependencies and still creating 'smaller' Clarity-projects (that contain those tasks) which represent your discrete work packages (aka user-stories) and other Clarity projects that "rollup" the data however you need it (which was what I was trying to get at in my earlier post).

Does CA have any documentation describing steps to interlink projects at the task level? I have three projects where I am trying to link several tasks across the projects. I have a program setup with all three projects, but when I open the program in MS Project, it opens as read only and doesn't allow me to make any links. Any direction on this?

Ed

Ed:

As I've mentioned above, "Task to Task" dependencies are just common, normal, entirely usual functionality with project planning. The fact you are getting read-only plans in MSP does not sound like anything to do with dependencies though.

--

But I'm afraid since I don't use MSP so I can't explictly say how you set them up in that tool...
In OWB they are just "external dependencies" (and OWB connects to Clarity to let you choose the project and task that the the task in OWB is (externally) dependant upon).
In the Clarity GUI you can see (and create) them on the Task screen, in the "Dependencies" subtab, so if you are struggling to get MSP to set them up, set them up in the Clarity GUI?