Clarity

Hello all,

I wanted to reach out to the PPM community and see if anyone had already developed a clean way to set up alerts for project dependencies in PPM. I'm very new to PPM so my knowledge of what it can and can't do it limited so please excuse me if I ask a question with an obvious answer. I know how to link a task, milestone, etc from one project to another and I have found a few different ways to show those dependencies. What I have not not been able to figure out is how to create some sort of visual alert (flag, action item, etc.) or email to let me know that a dependent task on another project has missed or changed it's date and now my project is affected. Surely someone out there (much smarter than I) has already figured this out and wouldn't mind sharing their solution. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Jamie.

    We're an Open Workbench shop - so our current process today is for PMs to monitor this via their Dependency Violation views. 

  Can you view dependent project tasks at a prgram level?

  Dependancy views hard to use

The data is there in the data model. On a recent program I lobbied to create a suite of reports and automated alerts to address exactly what you're looking for but was not supported. Best I can do is vote up Ideas here for CA to add this capability. 

  CA Gantt Chart - indicating schedule violation like in Open Workbench

  Provide Dependency Violation & Has Issue, Risk or Change Request Booleans on Task Object Data Providers <-- with this one could easily produce Dependency Violation views by project, master project, program, portfolio, obs, etc - all from object views without code development.

Maybe something is possible with the new Automated Calculated Attributes - I haven't explored this yet. I'm eager to hear/learn if others have successful approaches to this. For us, today, the PM still has to manually monitor this.

CA Team: Is there any development done by CA on this question of alerting change in the project dependencies. Was an idea submitted & Does CA PPM 15.4 has a notification capability for this now?

Hi Jamie

We had a similar issue with dependencies.  We created a process to email the PM if they were dependent on a project's launch date. Our launch date milestones have a fixed ID so we are able to reliably use this as an auto start condition for the process.

We also have a job which runs daily for new dependencies.  This runs a process which contains a script.  The script looks for dependencies with a created date of today -1 and emails the relevant PM.

Hi Robert, is it possible I can get the process script and job details to evaluate its use at our organization. 

I would be interested too!

Hi

The below is the script I put into a process which is then run each morning via an Execute Process job....

<gel:script xmlns:core="jelly:core"

xmlns:gel="jelly:com.niku.union.gel.GELTagLibrary"

xmlns:sql="jelly:sql" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

<gel:setDataSource dbId="niku"/>

<sql:query var="result1">

SELECT
depen.code dependent_project,
depen.name "dep_project_name",
(select srm.LAST_NAME||', '||srm.FIRST_NAME from niku.srm_resources srm where srm.user_id = depen.manager_id) "PM",
prin.code "inv_depends_on",
prin.name "depends_on_name",
(select srm.LAST_NAME||', '||srm.FIRST_NAME from niku.srm_resources srm where srm.user_id = prin.manager_id) "Depends_on_pm",
(select srm.email from niku.srm_resources srm where srm.user_id = prin.manager_id) "Dep_on_pm_email",
(select srm.LAST_NAME||', '||srm.FIRST_NAME from niku.srm_resources srm where srm.user_id = dep.Created_by) "Creator",
(select srm.email from niku.srm_resources srm where srm.user_id = dep.Created_by) "Creator_Email",
dep.Created_date,
dep.Last_updated_date,
dep.Last_updated_by

FROM
NIKU.PRJ_PROJECT_DEPENDS dep,
NIKU.inv_investments prin,
NIKU.inv_investments depen

WHERE
NIKU.dep.Principal_ID = prin.id
AND niku.dep.Dependent_ID = depen.id
AND trunc(dep.created_date) = trunc(SYSDATE-1)

</sql:query>

<core:forEach items="${result1.rowsByIndex}" trim="true" var="row1">
<core:set var="dependent_project">${row1[0]}</core:set>
<core:set var="dep_project_name">${row1[1]}</core:set>
<core:set var="PM">${row1[2]}</core:set>
<core:set var="inv_depends_on">${row1[3]}</core:set>
<core:set var="depends_on_name">${row1[4]}</core:set>
<core:set var="depends_on_pm">${row1[5]}</core:set>
<core:set var="dep_on_pm_email">${row1[6]}</core:set>
<core:set var="Creator">${row1[7]}</core:set>
<core:set var="Creator_Email">${row1[8]}</core:set>

<gel:log level="INFO">Email Address selected: ${dep_on_pm_email}</gel:log>

<gel:email from="PMO@COMPANY.COM" - Update with your own email address
fromName="Clarity"
subject="A Dependency has been created against your project: ${inv_depends_on}"
to="${dep_on_pm_email}">
<![CDATA[
<html>

<br>A dependency was raised against your project ${inv_depends_on} ${depends_on_name} yesterday.</br>
<br>${dependent_project} ${dep_project_name} depends on the launch date of ${depends_on_name}.</br>
<br>Please review and take any required actions</br>
</html>
]]>

</gel:email>

</core:forEach>

</gel:script>

Thanks Robert. I will reach out if any questions on second part of looking up new dependencies. 

Somehow our system is not generating unique task ID's (Text1 field) appropriately. Need to get that corrected out first.