Additional Project Meta-data

Overview:

Add additional properties to Project.net projects to capture missing information about the projects, such as project charter or project initiative. Ideally, customers would be able to define what company-specific meta-data to collect.

Customer issue or problem:

When managing a portfolio of projects, customers use a variety of information to help group and classify projects, such as project risk or what area of the company is funding the project. They use this information organize projects when deciding which projects to approve or when monitoring projects. Currently, Project.net’s list of project properties is too limited and there is no way to expand the list.

Description:

Here is a complete list of project properties for Project.net. Existing project properties are shown in normal font; new or altered properties are shown in italics.

Property	Description	Type	Size
GENERAL
Support code	System-assigned project identifier	Read-only integer	No change
Project Name	User-defined project name	String	No change
Brief Description	Project description	String	No change
Project ID	User-defined project identifier	String	0 – 25? characters
Business Owner	What business, if any, owns the project	System-supplied drop-down menu of qualified businesses	No change
Subproject of	Parent project, if any	System-supplied drop-down menu of qualified projects	No change
Project Sponsor	A person or entity, generally a high-level champion	String	No change
Project Manager	Person’s name	String	0 – 25? characters
Program Manager	Person’s name	String	0 – 25? characters
Initiative	A project may be part of a larger undertaking, called an initiative. For example, creating in-store displays and newspaper ads may be two separate projects, both related to a Christmas sales initiative. This property allows customers to filter for all projects related to a particular initiative.	String	0 – 25? characters
Functional Area:	General area of the company to which the project is associated	Drop-down menu of pre-defined areas	Administration, Manufacturing, Marketing, R&D, Sales, Services
Priority	Numeric indicator of the priority of a project	Integer	0-??
Risk Rating	Numeric indicator of the riskiness of a project	Integer	0-??
Project Charter	Textual description of the purpose & direction for the project	String (text box)	0-?? characters
PROJECT STATUS
Start Date:	Planned start date	Date (manually entered by the user or optionally extracted from the workplan)	No change
End Date:	Planned end date	Date (manually entered by the user or optionally extracted from the workplan)	No change
Project Completion	Project completion calculation method	Percentage (manually entered by the user or optionally extracted from the workplan)	No change
Overall Status:	Indicator of the current status of a project	Drop-down menu of pre-defined status	Not started, In Process, On Hold, Completed, Proposed, In Planning
Overall color code	Indicator of the overall health of a project	Radio buttons with pre-defined values	Green, Yellow, Red
Overall improvement code	Indicator whether a project is improving or declining.	Drop-down menu of pre-defined status	Improving, No Change, Worsening
Financial status color code	ndicator whether a project is within budget.	Radio buttons with pre-defined values	Green, Yellow, Red, None
Financial status improvement code	Indicator whether a project’s finances are improving or declining.	Drop-down menu of pre-defined status	Improving, No Change, Worsening
Schedule status color code	Indicator whether a project is on schedule.	Radio buttons with pre-defined values	Green, Yellow, Red, None
Schedule status improvement code	Indicator whether a project’s schedule is improving or declining.	Drop-down menu of pre-defined status	Improving, No Change, Worsening
Resource status color code	Indicator whether a project has the resources it needs	Radio buttons with pre-defined values	Green, Yellow, Red, None
Resource status improvement code	Indicator whether a project’s resource needs are being met.	Drop-down menu of pre-defined status	Improving, No Change, Worsening
Current Status description	Narrative of the current state of a project.	String	No change
FINANCIAL
Default currency	Denomination of the currency used in the project	Pre-defined drop-down of currency denominations	No change
Type of expense	Whether the cost of this project is considered a capital or current expense.	Drop-down menu of pre-defined expense classifications	Capital Expense, Current Expense, Deductible Expense
Budgeted total cost	Amount budgeted to complete the project	Currency	No change
Current estimated total cost	Estimated cost of the project	Currency	No change
Actual Cost To Date	Amount spent to date	Currency	No change
Estimated ROI	Rate of Return	Percent	0 – 999%
Cost Center	Which account is paying for this project	String	No change
MISCELLANEOUS

Features

Must Have

• Fields to capture the properties shown in blue in the table above.
  • Note, the properties above are organized in related groups
• The option to extract the Planning Start and End Dates automatically from the project work plan, if any, in addition to the current method of setting the dates manually.

Desired

• Customer-defined fields (it is OK if adding these fields requires a user with application administration capabilities)
• "Estimated ROI" is currently defined as a currency amount. It should be a percentage.

Implementation

Additional properties are accessed via special class - MetaData.java. It has the following methods:

public String getProperty(String propertyName) throws NoSuchPropertyException;
public String getPropertyType(String propertyName) throws NoSuchPropertyException;
public void setProperty(String propertyName, String propertyValue) throws NoSuchPropertyException;
public List getPropertyNames();

This class uses the following db tables:

Table1 (pn_project_space_meta_prop):

Property_ID	number (primary key)
PropertyName	varchar
PropertyType	number

Table2 (pn_project_space_meta_value):

Project_ID	number (foreign key)
Property_ID	number (foreign key)
PropertyValue	varchar

The PropertyName is an internal name, it is used to get/set properties via MetaData class. You can think of it like it is a ProjectSpace's field name; this name will not appear in the UI.

Table3 (pn_project_space_meta_value):

Property_ID	number (foreign key)
Combo_Label	varchar
Combo_Value	varchar

For this table we are going to store all the values of the combos that the project properties has. So we can start changing the purpose of this combos and theirs values whenever we want it with a script that we have develop for every customer request.

The script is the following one and is under the SVN structure under db/tools and it is called: change_combo_project_space_values.sql. Inside of this script we can change the tokens of all the pages that are being involved if we change those combos meanings and also we can change the values inside all the combos.

There are also helper methods to convert the property values to/from strings to the objects corresponding to their types (numbers, etc.) and to introduce the new properties.

Using such scheme, the addition of new properties is very easy - the new properties can be introduced without recompiling the application. The ProjectSpace class is kept cleaner (this can be very convenient as additional properties are not needed for all Pnet users). We can use lazy initialization of the MetaData class, thus there will be no performance overhead when the additional properties are not used.