Project Gateway 5

Every day, the people in your enterprise make choices. Are those choices based on a consistent and timely understanding of project goals, progress and issues? Project Gateway makes sure that they are.

Project Gateway is a project-oriented work management system that connects your people with each other and with the objectives of your enterprise. Built upon Lotus Domino® intranet technology, Project Gateway makes project knowledge securely available to both Lotus Notes® and Web users anywhere in your organization.

Open repository designs allow customer modification and integration with existing systems.

The repository ensures appropriate access with author-level security throughout and read-access control on selected documents.

Both Notes and Web browser clients have access to all of the facilities of the system.

Single-entry timesheets for effort and status enhance reporting and accountability. Timesheet data drives costing, dashboards, metrics and project status.

Agent-driven Project, Deliverable, Request and Costing Dashboards provide goal-oriented status at a glance.

A goal-oriented facility for organizing and reporting on major initiatives.

An interactive subsystem for initiating, approving, implementing and tracking service requests.

A secure cost-tracking facility to support your financial team.

An automated facility for productivity measurement which supports estimating and process improvement.

An easily accessible, automated archive that preserves records of completed work.

They come in all sizes. Some appear as thousand-step plans, others as maintenance requests. They are the reason you bring teams together. They are your standards for measurement and your symbols of accomplishment. Projects thrive on timely, shared information and suffer without this essential communication. Project Gateway creates active repositories which connect your project community with the information needed to achieve great results.

Great results come naturally when people make the right choices. Every day. As an individual contributor or as a manager, you work best when you feel in control and well-informed. A Project Gateway repository provides a place for prioritizing goals, reporting accomplishments, identifying problems and contributing to solutions. It is the shortest distance between today’s work and tomorrow’s deliverable.

Project Gateway bridges the gap between your to-do list and your company’s

mission statement. It is a framework for defining management objectives and a structure for reporting on them. Project Gateway’s deliverables connect everyone in your project community with the big picture so they can apply their skills and knowledge to accomplish your enterprise goals.

Connecting people with the experience of others is the essence of knowledge management. Project Gateway delivers situational awareness and your best practices to the desktop. It interviews participants to develop metrics for estimating. With Project Gateway, your project community becomes more capable, so your enterprise is more competitive.

For nearly a decade, Marin Research has been pioneering new technology for real-world project management. In 1993, the Project Gateway system began as a tool for publishing schedules for workgroups. Through continuous development and customer interaction, the Project Gateway system has evolved into the most practical and comprehensive product available for project work management. While the details change as the technology evolves, Marin Research’s mission remains constant: to build solutions that help your project community succeed.

Whether your work is managed as a single project or divided into dozens or hundreds of separate project plans, Repository Center gives you the information you need to be successful. The repository is a total information center that provides your project team with up-to-date information that can be accessed from anywhere by Notes Clients or Web browsers.

What Project Repository Agents Automatically Do For You:

Projects are the collection of documents that represent the work of the team and ultimately the knowledge base of the organization. Whether you do elaborate planning and time management or simply need a forum for organizing documentation, Project Gateway provides a rich environment for creating and implementing project work.

The Project Dashboard provides instant visual status for all of your projects, organized by program initiative. Color indicators show compliance with assigned schedule and effort targets, progress expectations and issue deadlines. Detailed roll-ups let you assess the work. Management targets for projects are compared with actual performance and color coded to highlight projects that require attention.

The Project Dashboard is maintained by active agents which search for and summarize details from thousands of supporting documents. Clicking on the project opens the profile document, which provides information about the project’s owners, objectives and relationships.

Projects are organized into programs so they can be compared and seen as part of a larger mission. Programs have supporting profile documents that provide a place for identifying responsibility, objectives and links to related programs and the current projects.

The Repository Center workload forecast view shows work planned for future months at each level of the project/program hierarchy. The time summary views provide details of actual effort by week. Each element provides program-level and project-level totals that drill down to the detailed assignments.

Agents automate your project oversight process. Project Gateway agents watch for and send email alerts on such problems as overdue assignments scheduled for your team, upcoming milestones, missing documents and open issues. Agents monitor dependencies between projects and actively alert you to problems. Key project events can be linked to meeting schedules maintained by the Lotus Calendaring and Scheduling facility.

Project Gateway maintains “baseline” information for all projects. Schedule and effort deviations are shown in the Project Dashboard, on project charts and in special performance analysis views. The Project Gateway Metrics Center provides a statistical basis for performance analysis.

Project Gateway leverages the Domino platform to handle all kinds of information: if you can put it on a computer, you can make it a project document in the Repository Center. Functional specifications, budget spreadsheets, engineering drawings, program modules, sample templates, quality assessments, layouts and change orders are examples of project documents. Special formats are provided for meeting minutes and Year 2000 module analysis, and others can be added easily.

Each project document can be individually secured to limit access to a specific person or team. Document lists are maintained by project, author, date and subject. Document requirements can be made part of the project. The Document Tracking View shows where in the project each document is supposed to be created, and when and where it will be needed, along with current availability. Agents send you notifications by email when required documents are missing or incomplete.

When an issue is opened, you can give it a due date and a priority and assign it to a specific person for resolution. Issues can be open, deferred or resolved. They are grouped by project, author and status. Issues support a hierarchy of responses to foster team communication. Overdue open issues are reported on the Project Dashboard with a color-coded indicator. Project Gateway supports risk management with an option that incorporates contingency plans, mitigation strategies and trigger conditions into the issue definition process.

Pictures are the most effective way to communicate schedules. Repository Center’s agent-based graphics technology prepares customized charts automatically so that everyone has access to the same up-to-date picture of schedules and commitments. Repository Center prepares an updated version of each defined chart nightly from the current repository information.

Projects from many sources can coexist in the Project Gateway Repository Center. You choose the project planning tool which best suits the work. Some projects can be created using simple forms, others using Repository Schedules and still others using plans developed with external scheduling applications. You can compose a new project with a single form and use it immediately as a forum for issues and a place to charge time and costs. You can add task assignments and documents or attach an external schedule later as needed.

When detailed schedules are required for project work, it is often easiest to use a dedicated planning system to lay out the tasks and responsibilities, then upload the plan to the repository for implementation. Managers with external schedules can publish and synchronize their plans with the repository using the Project Gateway publishing tools. One set of these tools add-in to the Notes Client, another add-in to Microsoft Project®, and a third is designed for use with a Web browser. There is also an API interface for systems integrators. The specific data transfer between the project and the repository can be customized. When an externally created schedule is published, Project Gateway creates an assignment document for each task assignment in the project. It also creates participant and project profiles and chart definitions.

Real projects are always evolving. The core of Project Gateway technology is a reliable synchronization system that updates projects with status changes made in the repository and allows project managers to revise published schedules easily. The synchronization system starts by retrieving the published plan and updating it with the most recent status information. Then it gets the version of the plan as provided by the project scheduler. It compares these two versions side by side to find where assignments and tasks have been changed, added, deleted, reassigned or reorganized. Then detailed changes are made, either to the project plan or to the repository. This process ensures that your plans can remain flexible over months or years of project implementation. Microsoft Project users can publish and synchronize projects directly from their Microsoft Project desktop using add-in software provided with Project Gateway. Just load your MPP file and press a toolbar button. All the status changes and hours entered in the repository by your project participants will be entered into your plan without any manual editing. Another toolbar button sends planning changes to the repository.

When you don’t need a full-featured scheduling package, you can use Project Gateway’s built-in Repository Schedule forms. A Repository Schedule is a Notes document that contains an embedded Lotus Component Project Scheduler object. Schedules can be created by typing the task list directly or by using a Repository Guide. Once you have listed the work to be done, you can use the mouse to adjust the dates. Press a button to publish the planned assignments and create a new project profile on your dashboard. The new assignments are made visible immediately to the people who need to act on them. Project managers can quickly update the schedule with the latest status information by pressing the “Update” button.

A Repository Guide is a special kind of Repository Schedule used as a smart template for creating new projects. When used, it presents a dialog of customization questions to the user and then creates a specific project plan based on user responses.

Guides are intended for organizations that do large numbers of similar projects and who want consistent project design. Candidates for guides include: maintenance, quality assurance, documentation, marketing communication, job shop operations and field service projects, to name just a few.

Guides make routine planning easy. They let people who would normally be intimidated by a project scheduler generate quality plans with little or no training. They are easy to create using the forms provided in Project Gateway.

Project Gateway helps people make the right choices about project work. The Repository Center brings assignments together as an organization-wide to-do list presented in many different ways to meet individual needs. For each person, Repository Center arranges assigned activities by date, by project and by status. It shows the effort and dates of these activities and provides ways to make changes.

Assignment documents contain the name, description, status and dates of each assignment. Project Gateway constructs links to predecessor, successor and coworker assignments. These links enable you to see the status of what you are dependent upon and who is dependent upon you. Each assignment document contains its own revision history, edit log and security fields.

The document tracking section allows specific project documents to be associated with individual assignments. The Taskhelp™ feature links assignments to proper procedures, training and examples.

Using assignment data, Repository Center constructs Workload Forecasts showing activity projections for many months in the future. Not just for the individual project team member, these forecasts extend upward to show the loading of teams, departments and entire divisions.

These workload tabulations help everyone recognize serious, upcoming resource problems which require a realignment of management goals. The repository provides the information necessary to create a consensus for constructive action.

Repository Center maintains discussion threads for topics of continuing concern. For information specific to a particular project, Issue Documents raise awareness of problems and Project Documents provide a place for such working materials as meeting minutes and design specifications. All these items can be made widely available or secured for the private use of a specific work team.

Repository Center provides an automatic way for people to stay on top of their commitments by alerting team members when a predefined situation arises. The system looks at all your assignments, generally once each evening, and compares the status of the assignment with the rules that you select. You identify conditions that interest you; the system then sends you an email that describes the situation and contains a link to the assignment of concern. Simply click on the notification settings in your personal participant profile document to specify the situations that should trigger an email. The system will also provide you with up-to-date Gantt charts showing all of your commitments.

Project Gateway integrates the collection of time spent on project tasks with overhead reporting. The system provides a simple way to report status and collect weekly data without double entry. A selection of overhead categories can be defined for each participant, which then appear as additional rows on the timesheet.

Timesheets can be created, approved and posted from any Notes Client or Web browser with no add-in software. Anyone in your organization can use the timesheet facility.

To report time, you click on the “Create New Timesheet” navigator button. From a Notes client, you press a button to fill the timesheet form with the assignments in your private task folder. From a Web browser, select the reportable tasks from the provided checklist; the server then returns a customized timesheet form. As you enter your task and overhead hours into the timesheet grid, row totals, column totals and work remaining are maintained.

The timesheet can be filled in on a daily basis and submitted on a weekly basis, or completed all at once. Timesheets can be created for past periods, which is useful when catching up after business travel or vacations. Timesheets can be created by the working individual or by another person specifically designated with the authority to create that person’s timesheets.

Depending on the individual and your organization, a timesheet can be routed to a manager for approval or posted automatically. When submitted for third-party approval, the time-sheet can be approved or rejected. Rejected timesheets can be revised and resubmitted.

The posting process automatically updates individual assignment documents with the proper status changes and work hours. No additional status reporting is necessary. Posted timesheets provide input to the Costing Center subsystem for generating project and departmental costs.

“With the Project Gateway timesheet system, you get objective, analytical information on exactly where you stand and how well you are doing on any given project. The Project Gateway timesheet system is easy to use and it works.”
Lou Alenskas
National Association of Independent Insurers

Deliverables give you the big picture

Our easy-to-use Deliverables Facility helps you track major initiatives, including new product development, Year 2000 compliance, business process reengineering, marketing campaigns, department relocation and production start-ups.

In the Project Gateway system, deliverables are information capsules that provide practical ways to communicate executive data points without immersing the user in the complexity of the actual workflow. The Deliverables Facility works as a shared whiteboard showing what must be accomplished within the initiative and the status of each contributing element. This information is presented in a top-down outline tree of results that we call “Deliverables.”

In this framework, each deliverable has a responsible manager, targets for completion time and effort and a variety of status indicators. As you progress down the tree, each element of the deliverables chain is a component of the goals and tasks preceding it and is a summary of the specific items following it.

The Deliverables Dashboard provides the focal point for the entire facility. Color-coded indicators show how each deliverable is tracking its individual targets and how those targets relate to the overall initiative. Executives can immediately see areas that require their attention.

Each deliverable in the hierarchy may include some or all of the following elements:

Deliverables provide a way to identify and manage elements outside of your department's immediate control, such as funding approvals, regulatory agency actions, contract negotiations, site preparation, equipment installation and the work of independent firms. They also provide a conduit for communicating the results being produced within your project teams, so everyone can see how their work folds into the big picture.

Project Gateway’s deliverable system uses flexible definition and status reporting to support a wide range of applications. One project may contribute to several deliverables at different times, and one deliverable may involve work on several projects as well as events completely outside of your project process. To accommodate these variations, you can associate key project events (from multiple projects) and entire projects with individual deliverables. These can be used in a support role to assess progress or can be tied directly to the estimated completion date and projected effort of the deliverable. Active repository agents update the deliverables whenever any of the linked project information changes.

To remain competitive, managers must both drive the process of knowledge acquisition and make sure that they and their staff benefit from it in everyday work. Predictable delivery and consistent quality are the hallmarks of a professional organization but are never easy to achieve. Project Gateway can help you reach these goals.

Taskhelp™ technology links work assignments directly to online examples and training materials so they can be easily accessed and applied to real work.

Repository Guides enable people to create higher-quality plans for routine work by reusing and customizing templates built by more experienced planners.

New Metrics technology actively interviews your staff to gather your implementation experience into a database that supports time and budget estimation and provides a statistical foundation for ongoing process improvement.

The Repository Archive retains access to documentation and records of completed projects while minimizing the size of the active repository.

"We have 22 projects involving 150 people - Project Gateway allows us to combine multiple projects, to look at information across projects and to do resource forecasting. Customizing Project Gateway is a straightforward process, and we leverage the power of the Web using the Domino platform."

Matt Speelman
Ernst & Young
Management Consulting

Metrics Center is an agent-driven subsystem that provides an automated method for defining, acquiring and evaluating experience that can be put to immediate use in the estimation and planning process for future work.

You have complete control over the measurements made by this system because you create the questions using the forms provided. When a work item is completed, the metrics manager selects the appropriate question list for that task. The Metrics Center allows a manager to define lists of questions appropriate for development, documentation, systems maintenance and any other work category.

Individual questions can require a numerical response (how much, how many), a multiple-choice response or a text response (comment or customer code, for example). Each question can provide instructions which you can access directly from the questionnaire.

The questions you choose to ask will depend on the kind of work you do. If you are doing classic IT systems development, then you may want users to specify how many function points were created in their work. On the other hand, if you do development with a high-level tool like Notes, you may prefer to ask how many forms, agents or views were produced, because these items are easier to count. For documentation work, your measurements might include pages, chapters or help screens.

In addition to asking people to define how much was produced, you may want to ask about the type of work completed: Did you write new chapters, or edit existing ones? Did the scope of your work change during the project? How much time did you spend learning to use new tools versus actually working on the task? Project Gateway’s Metrics Center makes all of this information working knowledge for the entire enterprise.

The measurement process begins whenever an assignment, phase or project is completed. The metrics manager is then notified and instructed to select a questionnaire from the library maintained in Metrics Center. Project Gateway sends the questionnaire to the appropriate participant or project manager for his or her input.

The results of the questionnaire are combined with repository data, including planned and actual hours, dates and other information, to produce a set of detailed measurement reports. These raw reports are automatically reviewed for quality, and those which fall outside anticipated norms are posted for manual inspection, correction or rejection.

Approved measurements are then used to construct an Integrated Knowledge Record for each completed project, phase or activity. These records store the information gathered from the Repository Center database, including planned and actual dates, effort, project names and information gathered directly from questionnaires, such as function points produced or chapters written.

Metrics Center provides two integrated functions that can be used to ask questions about the accumulated experience: query and estimating. The query function returns a set of records with particular characteristics. The estimating function returns an estimate based upon the available measurements for a particular question. Many selection and tabulation options are provided. These functions work from both Notes and Web clients.

A typical estimating activity might be to find out how long it has taken to produce 300 pages of system documentation. The result would show the number of prior cases and provide a range of estimates for 300 pages derived from the most productive, average and least productive experiences. You can then refine the selection criteria or examine the individual record to provide more insight.

Depending on the scale of your organization, Project Gateway will produce useful collections of metrics records within a few months. After a year, you will have well-documented data points for common types of work that can greatly improve your estimating and provide real insight for process improvement.

The Repository Archive subsystem provides a simple and reliable way to retain records of completed projects, deliverables and timesheets while removing them from the active repository. Users submit archive requests for specific projects or deliverables. Archiving agents transfer the project profile, charts, issues, assignments and other documents to the Repository Archive subsystem. All of the documents are archived before any of them are deleted.

The Repository Archive has the same functional design as the Repository Center so users can explore the Archive without learning a new application. It can be accessed from both Notes and Web clients. The Archive is a store of real experience that cannot be readily interpreted by statistics. Reading the documents, issues and schedule history of past projects can help you avoid future problems.

Project Gateway connects your project community with the enterprise. The Request Center subsystem provides an effective bridge to customers. The Costing Center provides detailed information for your financial staff.

"Marin Research has been very responsive with both the technical side of system installation and the management side of helping people become confident and committed users of Project Gateway."

The Request Center subsystem supports the customers of information system departments, network support groups, engineering service functions, field service functions and marketing communications groups by providing a consistent point of entry for new service requests and automated status reporting. The same features make it a convenient method for initiating work from within your project organization. Typical requests might be for upgrades, network configuration changes, customer installations, defect resolution, training and ECOs.

Request Center routes new requests to appropriate individuals for estimation, approval and scheduling. It sends email notifications when a request changes hands. Requests can be assigned specific billing codes which are passed to the Costing Center subsystem for calculating charge-backs.

Request Center then schedules approved requests as assignments or projects in the Repository. These contain links back to the originating request, which ensure that the supporting details, descriptions and comments are always available at the time of implementation to the people doing the work.

The Request Dashboard provides an automated summary of the schedule and progress of the work. Requesters can view the Dashboard without access rights to Repository Center.

Costing Center is the financial arm of the Project Gateway system. It creates detailed charge records which can be viewed directly, exported to a file or extracted with standard query tools such as Notes Reporter™. Costing Center is isolated from the main Repository Center for security so that financial information is available only to authorized users.

Agents automatically transfer data from approved timesheets and charge slips to the Costing Center for processing. Charge slip documents can also be used to bill hours or costs to projects, overhead or billing categories.

Each project, overhead or billing category has a cost distribution profile document which specifies how labor hours and direct charges are allocated on a percentage basis among as many as ten different charge codes. Charge codes can be defined in a flat or hierarchical structure. Participants may have multiple billing rates for their work. Although each project has a defined cost distribution, you can override this feature with a specific billing code on individual assignments or charge slips. Manual approval can be required for any charge or on a project, category or participant basis.

The Costing Center Dashboard provides an instant comparison of accumulated cost versus assigned budgets.

Project Gateway Repository Suite includes the entire system of five open database designs and all Project Gateway tools. Project Gateway Standard includes only the Repository Center database and the Notes-based Project Gateway tools. (ProjectWeb Publisher, Request Center, Metrics Center, Costing Center, and Repository Archive are not included.)

The Project Gateway system is licensed on a per-user basis. All people with read access to any of the repository databases must be licensed as users. Any number of databases can be created, used and replicated on any number of servers, so long as all users of all databases are licensed.

We offer an annual subscription service for product updates, version upgrades and product support. Customers are required to designate a site support coordinator.

Project Gateway 5 uses Lotus Notes “author-level” security to control document modification. Teams of users can be defined using forms in Repository Center to limit both read and edit access to specific documents. Access to each database in the suite is controlled separately.

Project Gateway is a Year 2000-compliant application.

Project Gateway Tools support the import and synchronization of project plans from Microsoft Project® 4; 95 and 98; Primavera P3®; SureTrak®; ABT Project Workbench®; Open Plan® and Time Line®. Please see our Web site for current information on supported versions.

Project Gateway Tools install directly within a Notes Client. Companion macros are provided which allow direct operation from within Microsoft Project when a Notes Client is installed. The ProjectWeb Publisher tool provides project upload and synchronization capability for Web client users.

Project Gateway databases are delivered to you as open designs. You are able to modify the forms, views, navigators, agents and other design elements in any way so long as you retain the copyright notices and limit access to licensed users. Marin Research will provide guidance to customers doing such modification as part of its maintenance service.

Server: Lotus Domino® 4.5 or later. (Note: PG4 remains available for Lotus Notes® 4.1 and earlier servers.)

Note: Support for ProjectWeb Publisher requires a Windows NT® Domino server using an Intel processor.

Note: When installing the Project Gateway Suite, all databases must be on the same Domino server.

Client: Notes 4.1 or later on any platform.

Web Client: Netscape Navigator® 3 or later, Microsoft Internet Explorer® 3 or later. File upload requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 or later.

The Project Gateway Tools for project file import and synchronization requires a Notes Client on MS Windows 3.1/95/NT or a Web client on MS Windows 95/NT. Notes clients can be used for project publishing on any Domino server platform.

Creating and updating Repository Schedules based on Lotus Components technology requires an MS Windows 95/NT PC with a 32-bit Notes Client, with Lotus Components and the Project Gateway Tools installed. Once the schedule has been published as assignments, any Repository user can access it.

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