Is Project Tracker a collaboration tool or a work tracking tool?

The success of any project depends on managing and solving problems. How you use the tools will depend on how your project is organized and your planned workflow processes.

You can use the tools as a knowledge sharing device and a means of tracking and managing the health of your project.

Information captured within Project Tracker can be highly effective for many areas within a project. As Project Tracker is so highly configurable, knowledge resources can be customized to the needs of each discipline within an organization. Tracking a feature across disciplines can be done by copying artifacts and creating dependencies between them. For instance, Project Go has artifact types organized by milestone within the feature lifecycle.

• Project Go has the following artifact types: Planning, Development, Testing, Release management and Support.
• New features are entered in the Planning artifact type where they are processed till ready for development.
• At that point, the artifact is copied to Development, Release management and Testing artifact types and all copies are set to blocked by the Development artifact.
• All actors have a full description of the feature, including all conversations involved in creating the specifications.

Since all artifacts have interdependencies, monitoring efforts across discipline lines is an easy process.

Blocking all the artifacts by the Development artifact means that none of them can be closed till the development cycle has completed, but each group can continue to work based on what is happening with the development project.

For example, documentation may be a part of the release management cycle. Writers can track the features in development and track their documentation efforts in their own artifact with links to the development artifact. After the feature has been released to the users, support can track incoming artifacts and easily access information about the feature through any of the artifact types and be able to link to other areas quickly through the artifact history.

Project Tracker can assist in tracking and assessing the health of a project. If your project is experiencing a particular type of concern you need to track, Project Tracker can help you do this through a series of processes.

For example, Project Go has just added a new database and developers are concerned that the new database will cause significant performance problems. While running routine reports and queries, the project lead has determined that there is, indeed, a performance artifact possibly associated with the new database.

It is determined that fixing this problem is top priority and critical to the success of the project. To facilitate work on this problem, the project owner has created an artifact entry template and series of queries and reports. Users are asked to use the template and enter specific information about what they have found in a description attribute. The template is used to regularize information about artifacts.

Using a saved query, project members can quickly access artifacts involving this concern and concentrate efforts in critical areas.