Overview of Project Management

This chapter provides a brief overview of Oracle Project Management.

This chapter covers the following topics:

Features of Project Management

Oracle Project Management provides project managers a solution for maintaining control and visibility of all aspects of their projects.

As a project manager, you can view project information at a single source point enabling you to track and manage a project through the project lifecycle, from creating and planning, through to completion. Using Oracle Project Management, you can perform the following tasks:

Workplan and Progress Management

A workplan contains a hierarchical organization of tasks within a project. Each workplan contains an unlimited number of tasks and you can define as many levels as you want. A project structure is sometimes referred to as a work breakdown structure, or WBS.

You can set up two types of structures in Oracle Projects: workplan structures and financial structures. Workplan management helps project managers and team members deliver projects on time, financial structures help project and financial administrations track financial information for one project, or for all projects within an organization.

You can define a unique workplan for each of your projects, as opposed to using a single standard template. You can create tasks, or copy tasks from other projects and templates to save time. You can manage tasks and task hierarchies within the workplan, and expand or collapse the work breakdown structure to give you a high-level view of your projects and tasks. Workplan and progress management also assists team members to manage their tasks effectively, and communicate their progress to project managers.

You can view the latest unpublished workplan, create and maintain tasks, and publish a new workplan version.

Project managers and team members can update the workplan with progress reports. As a team member, you can view all individual tasks assigned to you that require progress reports. As a project manager, you can provide progress reports for individual tasks, and also update the progress on the whole project.

By publishing your progress, you can communicate changes to the workplan to the project team. You also can communicate progress information with reduced administration by automatically rolling up the progress information within the work breakdown structure.

When a team member provides progress for your project, you receive an automated email notification alerting you to any significant issues or date changes. maintains a history of progress updates. In addition, you can also enable the collection of remaining effort and percentage complete to be reported at the workplan level.

You can use workplan versioning to create multiple working versions and evaluate schedule changes. All previously published workplan versions are stored for tracking purposes and are saved in the historical archive.

For more information on workplan and progress management, see: Creating and Updating Workplans.

Integrating with Microsoft Project

You can continue to use Microsoft Project when working with your projects, while benefiting from the features that it has to offer.

You can send and receive a project, send an update, view real-time project information, and receive real-time values for task attributes. You can send the following information from Microsoft Project to :

You can send the following information to Microsoft Project from:

You can use Microsoft Project to update the project schedule, progress, and budget information. After all project details have been entered, you can then send the project plan to a workplan or financial structure. Version details are displayed when a project plan is linked to a workplan structure and versioning is enabled.

For more information on integrating with Microsoft Project, see: Overview of Microsoft Project Integration.

Budgeting and Forecasting

You can create budgets and forecasts to manage the financial performance of a project throughout the project lifecycle. You can also create multiple budgets and forecasts for a project to demonstrate different scenarios. You can track project status and performance by comparing project budget and forecast amounts to actual amounts using Project Performance Reporting and Project Status Inquiry features.

Using budgeting and forecasting you can perform the following functions:

For more information on budgeting and forecasting, see: Using Budgeting and Forecasting.

Project Status Reporting

You can report relevant project status information for targeted audiences controlling the content, publishing, frequency, and format. For example, you can provide a monthly internal management report for your project steering committee, and a weekly team project status report for your project.

As the project manager, you can control access to unpublished reports, prevent updates and deletion of published reports, publish reports to be viewed online, and communicate information to users without system access, via email. Email and workflow notifications are sent out containing a snapshot of the status report, the report is then approved, rejected, or forwarded to another approver.

You create status reports based on report types. Report types determine the audience, and other details such as the reporting cycle, reminder rules, and report approver options.

When you associate a report type with a project, you define the reporting cycle, set up the reporting approver's options, and choose a reminder rule for the report. Reporting cycles define the start and end dates for the reporting period.

For more information on project status reporting, see: Overview of Project Status Reporting.

Issue and Change Management

Oracle Projects provides you with a centralized system to manage issues and change requests. This functionality enables team members to work together collaboratively to resolve issues and communicate and implement changes to the project.

Using issue management, you can track issues and change requests from creation through to completion, and deal with concerns or outstanding questions on projects. You can:

Using change management, you can deal with events, actions, or conditions that affect the scope, value or duration of a project or task. Using change documents, you can plan for changes to cost and revenue budgets and implement final changes once approved.

For more information on issue management, see: Overview of Issue Management.

For more information on change management, see: Overview of Change Management.

Document Management

Oracle Projects enables you to attach and store documents with projects on which you are a team member. You can attach the following types of documents:

To attach documents, you must have authority to access the corresponding project, task, or function. If you have access to a project, task, or function, you automatically have access to all attached documents.

You can utilize folders and versions, checking documents in and out, and ensure security for all documents.

You can specify attachment categories to help you define the types of documents that can be attached to a project, task, or function. You can define attachment categories based on common characteristics that a class of documents have, and to improve search results.

For more information on document management, see: Overview of Document Management.

Expenditure Review

You can see the amount and type of expenditure items charged to a project, the date an expenditure item occurred, and accrued revenue. You can also drill down to Oracle Payables to view the Invoice Overview window, or view T-accounts.

This feature requires the installation of Oracle Project Costing. For information on expenditure review, see: Viewing Expenditure Items, Oracle Project Costing User Guide.

Billing Review

You can review each invoice before you approve and release it, using the Invoice Summary window or the Invoice Review report.

You can review invoice information such as:

In addition to reviewing invoice information, you can review an invoice to ensure that it did not encounter any generation errors or distribution warnings during generation, and to monitor the status of your invoices.

You can use the Invoice Review report to review and verify the draft invoices associated with a project before approving and releasing them. Once a draft invoice has been released, it is interfaced to Oracle Receivables. This report also shows detail items billed on an invoice.

This feature requires the installation of Oracle Project Billing For information on billing review, see: Reviewing Invoices, Oracle Project Billing User Guide.

Project Performance Reporting

Project performance reporting features provide you with an at-a-glance comparison of actual versus planned performance as defined in project budgets and forecasts. You can view performance in the areas of effort, cost, profitability, earned value, billing and collections, or capital costs.

You can use project performance reporting to obtain a graphical and tabular overview of project performance and use this information to make informed decisions. You can view project performance information at the project, task, and resource levels by time period. After viewing key financial metrics for tasks and resources, you can drill down to view detailed transaction information such as commitments, expenses, and events. You can use the Oracle Applications personalization feature to configure the project performance information contained in measures and graphs, and the layout of project performance pages.

For more information, see: Project Performance Reporting.

Performance Exceptions Reporting

Performance exceptions reporting features enable you to view a summary of exceptions and issues on a project through visual status indicators that denote exceptions. The status indicators provide you with an immediate understanding of critical, at risk, and on track issues on the project. These features enable you to focus your time and effort on solving critical problems faced on a project.

You can drill down to the details of a single exception, and enter or review remarks and reminders for corrective actions. You can set up Oracle Projects to automatically generate the latest exceptions and key performance area status indicators on a periodic basis. You can also set up Oracle Projects to automatically communicate the latest key performance area performance statuses and exceptions to key stakeholders via e-mail.

For more information on performance exceptions reporting, see: Performance Exceptions Reporting.

Project Status Inquiry

You can quickly and easily review the current status of a project, and then drill down for a more detailed review of the project and its tasks. It enables you to search for a project using search criteria. You can review project, task, and resource summary amounts, and actual and commitment amounts using a different resource list.

Oracle Projects maintains various levels of project summary amounts for cost, commitment, revenue, and budget amounts by project, task, and resource. You can review project summary amounts to quickly determine the status of a project, such as reviewing the current and original budgeted amounts and compare them to actual and commitment amounts. You can drill down to see summary amounts for the resources of the project or the selected task. You can select a resource list by which you want to view actuals and budgets. In addition, you can export project status inquiry data into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

For more information on project status inquiry, see: Project Status Inquiry.

Reporting Pack

You can choose to regularly receive as e-mail attachments, a set of reports on project performance summaries and details. This reporting pack enables you to monitor project performance without accessing the application and archive the reports you receive for future reference.

Oracle Projects provides predefined report templates and a predefined data definition file. Alternatively, your system administrator can create new report templates to configure the content, presentation, and output format of reporting pack reports. In addition, your system administrator can define the intervals for the generation and distribution of these reports.