Clarity

Hi all.

   It's that time of year again where we swear we're going to get all Non Project work out of Projects.

   Probably like yourself we manage 100s of commercial off the shelf applications (COTS). Our managers budget for and manage this work today in PPM in what we call 'Service & Operations Projects'. Our implementation started pre NPIOs, so part of this is 'this is the way we've always done it' and the other part is - and I want to be wrong here - we can't seem to see how NPIOs give us what we need and make our world easier.

Let's take an application for example. We allocate to 'Support', 'Maintenance', 'Other Stuff' with the remaining Project Availability for Project work. Taking this paradigm into an Application & dreaming a bit, we'd like to be able to allow a manager to sub enumerate some Maintenance & Support 'bucket' tasks on their Application, then have the ability to easily enumerate a backlog of Service Requests as they come in and work them individually based on whatever process they wish (we're a long way off from DevOps, but a Kanban approach is something most can understand). 

I've checked with Agile Central, and while, yes, people do this, bringing another tool in is probably outside of our budget and change appetite. I've been asked to research what is the best we can do with what we own. If we could put a WBS on an NPIO we could get it all on one object. Has anyone figured out a backdoor to get multiple tasks on an NPIO? I've played around with the Incidents on the Application, but these only support converting to Tasks or Projects which defeats our purpose - our goal here is to get all this work out of projects.

Does anyone have any slick NPIO solutions they can share?

While I'm dreaming... Simple Work Type Centric Allocations.

This won't be at all helpful to your overall goal, but we do use applications here, however due to the limitations you've already listed, only as general operational buckets of time. Resources are assigned to the application team and allocated and book their time, but the specifics of the work done are tracked as tickets in our ticketing system (CA ServiceDesk for the record).

My long term goal was to expand jaspersoft to include the SD domains and create reports to correlate time spent supporting the app within clarity, and ticket volume logged in SD, but there is talk of moving to another ITSM tool in the future so we may never get to that point.

At some point I was able to find a way to get to a "task list" page for an NPIO because I did find that it basically has the same ~rmw "effort task" that a project has if you use that functionality, but the more I went down that hole the worse of an idea it seemed to become so I let it go, I'd love to see if anyone else has gotten further along though

Thanks Lino. I've just successfully xogged multiple tasks onto an Application so I see potential. Do you recall how you got a task list page? URL?

Usual caveats for anyone else that comes along looking at this later on (I obviously don't need to tell you this), but this is all super unsupported, do in test, keep backups, yadda yadda. Now that being said for anyone adventurous...

Go to https://clarityurl/niku/nu#action:projmgr.keyTaskList&classCode=application&id=appid

There will be an error on the top, but you'll see the ~rmw task, and surprise, a New button. Click it and you'll get a new task page, but it will all be read only and not have an input field to enter a task name. Bummer. Open developer tools (F12 usually) on another normal New Task page from a project or wherever, and copy the input element. Inspect the area the input should be on the broken task page, and paste the normal one. Enter a task name. Save. I think it gives an error or reloads the page or something, but if you go back you'll see your new task there. Surprise!

That's as far as I got before the errors scared me off, but good luck if you want to keep pushing it.

Brilliant! I see my tasks I xogged in. As long as the data model can handle this little test...

Dreaming out loud - what my users really want is all of this in the box. If it's not in the box, what's next best? Integrate the tool they'll work in (Agile Central, Jira, etc) to the Application Object.

My wheels are turning...

We hit this massive roadblock as well, where in particular Applications (and their support and maintenance activity) requiring detail (i.e. tasks) could only be supported buy the 'Project' investment object. When we deployed all our investments as 'Projects' we got some raised eyes, but fortunately not much pushback outside of our PPM project team (because most new Clarity users are completely unaware of the other NPIOs).

For us this is a huge gap as it does not allow us to delineate non-project work at the level that is now being requested by our leadership. In many of our Technology teams we have moved to a DevOps model, where a single team manages both Development and Operations work. The only way we can achieve this split is to set up multiple investments - doubling the administrative overhead around management of investments.

The problem is further exacerbated when we look at our Application Platforms (or Business Services). For the client, the Application Platform is what they are interested in as an investment. For the Technology team, this platform may constitute several applications bundled together. At my current site, if we were to create one investment per application (some of them are small and not enterprise systems) we would immediately bump up our investment list by over 1,000 - and we only have just over 3,000 technology team resources. So we have had to rely on 'Projects'

Robert_Ensinger hope this helps.

Haven’t seen this done, yet, but thinking outside of the box:

•   Build a new “Task” tab with an HTML portlet, within Application object, where one can create Other Work instances attached to the application instance as children in the app’s hierarchy.

Other Work, out of the box, is pretty well stripped down to the basics, not much different than Task properties setup.

Export Other Work list to Excel to see Gantt view in something like Office Timeline, One Pager or DHTMLX.

https://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGantt/?fromMenu

https://www.onepager.com/products/products.php

Scheduling hasn’t been mentioned – here, the concern I would have is that we are creating solutions that won’t be portable to out of the box features like MSP Interface, OWB, PPM Gantt, or Agile plug-ins, at least not without a lot of custom.

Since we don’t have an excess of coding expertise for stuff like this, if push came to shove, I’d recommend our group stick to the out of the box project feature, and look for ways to minimize the admin effort, and keep the reporting separate.

•   On the application instance, can I place a “Create Project” and “Create Task” actions on pulldown menu, where the creation of these things would automate things?

•   Automatically ID project with app instance ID and suffix?

•   Use a stripped down version of a project with as few fields, automatically populated as possible?

•   Automatically attaching project to app’s hierarchy?

•   Give the project a type or categorization that filter out of project reporting to management

•   …..

•   Perhaps create a new task-like tab within app instance that displays these projects and tasks – editable, in html portlet

Ok – will stop here – just wanted to get some ideas out there – others can evaluate merit, build on them or pull them down.

Dale

ChrisYardin - what is the duration on your 'Application Projects'?

- Are they annual and recreate every year?

- Some long duration such as 10 years?

- Duration of Application's contract?

- Or are they 'forever until retired' and the end date is simply extended for a set time on a cadence?

We have to run them for multiple financial years. We don't go out as far as 10 years, but do run for a minimum of 3 years. To be honest we are not mature enough on the management of our software  / application assets, license renewals etc. The investments are invariably tied to a supporting business function, and in a lot of cases tool agnostic. For example, we might have a CRM platform which is what the investment represents, but if it is Oracle CRM or Salesforce then the investment itself does get specific all the time. The reality is we need a CRM function supported by software, irrespective of the license.

A little late to this but if the primary goal is to be able have more granularity in the effort spent by Application teams, an easier way to approach this would be to use User Lookup fields in the timesheet.

Typically, organizations are looking to bucket time worked on applications into a standard list of the activities, some examples could be Change Management, Incident Management, Preventive and Proactive. 

These could be configured as User Value1 or User Value2 in the timesheet and you can then apply a rule using the timesheet hook to prevent a user from submitting time on an application without having selected a relevant value in the User Value field. 

This would give you the ability to split the application time to a relevant level of detail (you will have work out the standard list of activites) without having to hack a WBS on applications.