Creating a New Project in Portfolio Server 2007 Part 3

BY: Tanya Foster

Today we’re going to talk about the Scheduling information for our new project that we created last time.

The Start and End date are required fields. These dates are the expected Start and End dates of the project. To set the Start Date, click on the calendar box next to the Start Date field. This will open up a calendar dialog box. Pick your expected start date from the calendar dialog box. Once you click on the date, the dialog box will disappear. Next, do the same thing for the expected End Date. For our project, I have chosen 8/10/09 as the Start Date and 8/10/10 as the End Date.

These next two fields are not required to be filled in when you first create your project. They can be added or modified at a later date. The Start No Earlier Than field is for you to put in a fixed start date for this project. It’s stating that this project cannot start any earlier than the specified date. The Finish No Later than field is for you to put in a fixed finish date. It’s stating that this project cannot finish any later than the specified date. We are going to say that our project can’t start any earlier than 8/01/09 (because we have some key resources who won’t be finished with their current project until then) and can’t finish any later than 10/01/10 (because our Employee Suggestion program is going live one week later and we have to have everything in place).

 Our next field is the Benefits Start field. This field is the date when the project benefits start to materialize. This is typically the end date of the project, but depending on the project, you may choose to use the start date. We’re going to use our expected End Date as our Benefits Start date.

We’re going to skip over some of the fields that aren’t required fields. If we went through every single field, then I might just be writing myself out of a job!

The Project Requester and the Project Manager positions can be held by the same person or by two different people. The person who enters the project into the Builder module is the one who selects their name for the Project Requester and also selects the name of the Project Manager. The Project Requester will “own” the project proposal until it is approved and then ownership will transfer to the Project Manager.

Now that we’ve entered all of our required fields (and some that aren’t), then we will go ahead and add our project.

If we go back to our Scorecard, we should see our new project listed under the HR area.

We have now successfully created a new project under an existing program. Stay tuned for more blogs on how to use this great tool!

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