Monitoring Progress in Open Workbench

You can use Open Workbench. Yay!

But can you monitor your progress in it?

This thought occurred as a result of reading some little detail in the markscheme for the sample piece of work we have. In AO1 - Row 2 the comment explaining why the candidate didn't get 4 marks says:

Project is used to plan time, which is appropriate, but candidate has not shown that it has been used to monitor progress, so the explanation does not warrant the fourth mark

So, we need to use Open Workbench to try to monitor our progress. Hmmmm....

NB: Before you do this BACK YOUR FILE UP!

Having discussed this in class, James "The Machine" found the Status Update tab - look down on the left hand side in the Controlling group. From this you can try:

• click in the Total Actuals (hours) column and put in the amount of time some jobs actually took - look, stuff happens
• check back on the Gannt chart and look at the phases bar - look: there's a little bar showing progress on the phase!
• take some screenshots now
• now change the Started box on the far right to Completed - it goes when you click away - not yet, but later! It disappears. Take some more screenshots - this shows that you're monitoring the progress that's occured as you're going along. You can see why, in a complex project, this would be a good idea yes? Good.
• check the Gannt chart view as well - the Gannt bars will eventually start changing some colour - and might shift (if you start a task which is dependent on another one!)

Take care with this. I think you need a couple of pages of screenshots to show that you monitored it. But be aware that you will lose views and information - which is why a backup copy's a good idea because me and JTM haven't worked out how to get them back again yet!

Open Workbench - an idiots guide

Just for Hayley (joke!)

Do stuff in this order:

1. enter the names of your resources (the people) and their initials in the bottom pane
2. right click each resource and Modify - type the persons job title in the Category box
3. I went with Developers, Project Manager, Tester, Client - you could have other project roles
4. enter the tasks in the centre pane. Try and get them in a logical order. You can add rows in by right clicking
5. add rows and enter phases - enter them like tasks and then right click and Modify and change the Type to Phase. This will give you a bracketed phase and let you break the project down into stages
6. sort the dates out - either drag the tasks along the Gannt chart or change the dates manually
7. sort the length of tasks out - either drag the bars on the Gannt chart or change the finish dates
8. now put in dependencies - I find it easier to drag them from the predecessor bar to the successor bar. Take care with dependencies - you want them to make sense. I would suggest that everything needs some kind of dependency as it will make you critical path analysis make more sense - but there may be jobs which can take place at the same time as each other
9. assign resources to tasks and give them time allocations in hours. Right click on each task and select Assignments and you can do this. Make sure the right people are in the right meetings - I would tend to have the Project manager meet the client for many of the meetings rather than have large meetings. Don't forget meetings with testers.

Tips:

Double click on the dates at the top of the Gannt chart and you can set the number of periods to display. You may need more than 26 periods if your project lasts more than 26 days. You can also change the scale from days to weeks which may well be a better way of displaying things if you have a project lasting more than 3 or 4 weeks

Double click on the Gannt chart itself and you can tick the holidays box to shade in weekends (yah!) and perhaps change the