RolloutExpert.com

Today we are pleased to announce a new way to help project teams stay on top of issues that occur during their rollouts. Feedback from BigWave users exhibited there are typical issues tracked in a project and reported back to the end user. BigWave now formalizes this concept with the new Issue Types feature. Issue Types replace the old Issues implementation. We will discuss the old vs the new implementations later in this article, but first let’s examine a scenario for a project where Issue Types come in handy.

For a site in a rollout let’s assume you contractually must track each time:

• The store manager isn’t on site
• The tech arrived late to the site

You may now enter these specific items as “Issue Types”. In the project Setup area is a new Issue Types tab. Similar to adding other things in BigWave you simply click “Add Issue Type” to add more.

On the work order page, comments are categorized by Issue Types.

After the comment is added you may Resolve the issue by clicking the yellow Resolve icon…

When the issue is resolved a special “Resolving Issue” screen is displayed.

The resolution is displayed in the comment thread with information that links it back to the original issue.

Now that you see how easy it is to specify and track issues, let’s take a quick look at the reporting.

In the project Home area the old “Issues” link now divides into a “Summary” and “Detail” report.

Clicking “Summary” yields summarized information with a date period filter (Current week, Previous week, Custom date range, etc). The report shows Total Issues by Issue Type for the date period given. If an issue in the Total Issues column is resolved, that is reflected in the Total Resolved column.

NOTE: For legacy projects “Issue” comment types are now mapped to an “Unspecified Issue” and are reported as such. If you start a project without entering any standard issues to track, the “Unspecified Issue” is available by default. If the project has standard issues defined, then the “Unspecified Issue” default option is not made available. “Unspecified Issue” is only for legacy projects and for projects that don’t define specific Issue Types to track.

You may drill into the details section by hyper-linking from one of the listed Issue Types. For example, clicking “Tech arrived late” above would show the details for that item. I clicked the Resolved option. Because there is only one “Tech arrived late” issue, and it has been resolved, then I must filter on Resolved issues to see the work order information.

We will be incorporating this functionality into a new alert type for sending nightly progress reports to a list of people. The Issue Type summary/detail reports will be one of a few options that can be included on this report.

Keep the great feedback coming, and let us know how we may continue to supply the most relevant solution for monitoring and control of rollouts!

Today a user asked how to make BigWave calculate the schedule date for an activity that occurs after a work order’s Requested Date.  To make this happen is fairly trivial, but I thought of an interesting way to check the dates quickly without having to do an export or inspect individual work orders one by one.

To have BigWave calculate a date for an activity that occurs after the work order’s Requested Date (aka the “install date”), simply change the activity’s lead time value to a positive number.  As you can see in the example below all activities except for the final one have negative lead times.  The final activity has a positive lead time of 14 days.

After making the change to the lead time value recalculate the schedule by going to the project’s Schedule Options area and click the “Click to recalculate the schedule” button.

For this example we choose the first option which is to recalculate only those items without actual dates entered and click next.

Once the process is complete, you may be wondering about an easy way to check the results.  We can do this with search.

Go to the search area and create a new search on the activity in question (in this example we search for “Remove Time D”).  Hit the Search button once the criteria is added.

This creates a report containing all the “Remove Time D” schedule entries for all work orders in this project.  If we click the “Modify Columns” link we can add the Requested Date field from the work order and compare the two side-by-side.

Firstly we click on the column we want to show (Requested Date).  Then click the right arrow button to push the column into view.  The click the “Move Up” button to where the Requested Date field is at the top of the list.

When you are done it should look something like this.  Click the Save button.

As you can see below the Requested Date field is shown in the search results.  Sorting by the Requested Date column will show all sites that have a Requested Date together, and you can quickly audit the dates of the “Remove Time D” activity!

BigWave has always had the ability to import customer sites.  The original importing process required the use of a spreadsheet with very strict column header names, only enabled the import of new sites (did not allow the update of existing sites with updated data), was not able to import custom fields, and required the user to wait several minutes on a background process to pick up the import and load the sites.

We now introduce a new and superior way to load your customer site data.  Some features of this are:

• Use any spreadsheet to upload your data.  No longer are you shackled to a strict format.  In most instances, a spreadsheet you receive from your customer may be uploaded with no modification or copying of data from one spreadsheet to another.
• Preview the upload.  If desired, BigWave can let you know the differences between your uploaded spreadsheet and the values in BigWave.  This preview feature shows exactly what will be uploaded/updated without actually modifying any data in the system.
• Update existing sites.  If you make a mistake and upload incorrect data, or you receive a spreadsheet with updated data, the BigWave information now can be updated from the spreadsheet.  This was not possible with the old site import process.
• Column mapping.  Now you can tell BigWave what columns from your spreadsheet to import.

Let’s walk through a quick example to demonstrate the functionality.

Say you have a spreadsheet that needs to be imported into BigWave.  It’s pretty simple and looks like the following:

To upload it, open the customer’s page by choosing from the menu ‘Manage Customers’

Choose the correct customer for which you are uploading site information, and choose the ‘Import/Export Center’ tab at the bottom of the screen.

Choose the ‘Import site information from Excel’ option, hit Next.

Specify your Excel file to upload, hit the Upload File(s) button.

On the next screen we are presented with all the available fields we can map.  BigWave makes an attempt to automap the column headers from the spreadsheet, but for those that aren’t mapped automatically, we must tell BigWave what to do.  In this case we will map Site Name to the ‘Site ID’  Excel column, and we will map Addr1 to the ‘Street’ Excel column.  We are only required to map Site ID.  All other fields are optional.

Notice we don’t import the ‘Install Date’ Excel column.  That will be used later when we create a project.  For now we are only importing customer site data and ‘Install Date’ isn’t needed.

The defaults on the import options are fine so we won’t change anything there.  Even though the ‘Create new contacts’ checkbox is selected, since we didn’t map those columns, no contacts will be added.

Hit the Next button and the import will commence immediately. 

Our import completed sucessfully.  If there were any issues during the upload process, BigWave will prepare a spreadsheet that may be downloaded and examined.  In it you will find detailed information about what the issues were.

That’s it, you have imported your sites! 

You may notice some discrepancies between the Scheduled Events report and a Search done on scheduled dates.

The reason is the two reports actually use slightly different search criteria.  Both reports search on scheduled start dates at the appropriate Scheduling Level (Work Order, Activity, Task).  However the Scheduled Events report filters on additional criteria including work order status and actual dates.

So the Scheduled Events report will never show more records than a search on the same set of dates.  However, it generally will show lower counts since it filters out those items that are completed by the criteria the actual date is entered or a work order status is closed.

BigWave offers 2 different ways to import scheduling information. The basic schedule import enables you to quickly import schedule dates and requested dates by site id. The advanced schedule import enables you to import the entire schedule including requested dates, scheduled dates and times, and actual dates and times. This article will discuss use of the basic schedule import in a real life project setup scenario.

Basic schedule import enables you to import via a common format found in many spreadsheets that are exchanged between the team in a rollout. This option enables you to open a spreadsheet, enter site id’s in the first column, enter dates in the second column, and upload it.

There are some requirements when working with this type of upload:

a) This import only works for those projects that have one work order per associated site. Older BigWave projects that have more than one work order per site (in a single project) are not able to use the basic schedule import and must use the advanced schedule import.
b) This import only works for schedule dates and work order requested dates and only for date values (not date/time values). If you need to upload actual dates, then the advanced schedule import must be used. If you need to upload date/time values (vs simple date values), then the advanced schedule import must be used.
c) Column A must contain your site id’s.
d) Column’s B, C, and on must match the name of an activity or task you are affecting depending upon your scheduling level setting for your project. For work order requested dates, you must use the column header ‘Requested Date’.
e) Row 1 contains your column headers.
f) Rows 2 and on contain site id’s (Column A) and date values (Columns B and on).

Let’s take a real world scenario.

A project manager is setting up a project in BigWave that contains 100 sites. The sites, already uploaded to the customer master site database, have been brought in and associated to the project.

Once the sites are associated, the PM must create a work order template that will contain the plan to be executed for each site. Each site in this project will go through 3 milestones that are tracked in BigWave. These are Site Survey, Ship Equipment, and Install, and each will become an Activity in the project.

The customer has given us hard dates that for the Surveys and the dates don’t really follow any pattern so these must be either manually keyed or uploaded into the project. Since we don’t want to hand-key 100 dates, we will choose to upload these.

The customer supplied a Requested Date for each site (aka the deadline for when each site must be complete), and rather than hand-key this, we will upload it as well.

The other two activities Ship Equipment and Install may be calculated based upon the Requested Date. We know that the equipment should arrive at least one week before the site is scheduled for installation, so in our model for each site we will make the lead time for Ship Equipment 30 days (just to be safe). The Install activity date is equal to the Requested Date so the lead time for this will be 0 days. You may recall that lead times calculate off the Requested Date. One final note, the duration for each of these activities we set to a single day.

So for this project our work order template will look like the following:

We will never want BigWave to calculate the Site Survey dates, so by leaving Lead Time and Duration blank, BigWave won’t touch these dates when asked to recalculate schedule dates. Lead time for Ship Equipment is set to 30 days, so if the Requested Date for a site is March 15th, then the Ship Equipment activity will calculate to February 14th. Since the duration is one day both the scheduled start and scheduled end dates will be February 14th for this activity. It follows that the Install activity will schedule on March 15th since the lead time is 0 days.

After this simple work order template is set up, the PM is ready to generate the work orders for the project. The PM does so.

100 work orders now belong to the project and the PM is ready to upload the dates. The PM creates a spreadsheet formatted to the above rules (or he can download a preformatted one using Export). The completed spreadsheet looks like the following:

The Site ID’s are in Column A, Columns B and C contain date values for Requested Date and the customer dictated Site Survey date. The rest we will leave up to BigWave.
This upload is accomplished with the Import / Export Center found in the project Setup tab.

The PM chooses the ‘Import’ option and clicks Next (or hit <ENTER> key on the keyboard).

Then the first Schedule import option is chosen. Hit Next (or <ENTER>).

The standard upload file screen is shown. Upload the file and the next screen appears. If you check ‘Map scheduled end dates to start dates’ then the upload dates will affect both the scheduled start and scheduled end value. If left unchecked, only the scheduled start dates will be affected.

Once you hit Next, you are committing the upload and BigWave will import the dates.

Now the PM has date values entered for the Requested Date and Site Survey. There is one final step to completing the project schedule and that is to calculate the Ship Equipment and Install dates. This is done by navigating to the Schedule Options area under the Setup tab. As a side note, notice the Scheduling Level is set to ‘Activity’. This is because the PM is managing this project with Activity items or “at the Activity Level”.

Click the “Click to recalculate the schedule” button to generate the rest of the schedule based upon your Lead Time and Duration values from the work order template.

That’s it! The concepts outlined in this article are directly applicable to the setup of almost any project in BigWave. Your schedule and plan for each site may be much more complex, but the process you follow to get it set up is the same.

Please email us at support@bigwavesoftware.com if you need further explanation on any of these concepts.

The BigWave web interface for entering pricing is an easy way to enter pricing as it occurs.  However, sometimes you may have lots of pricing detail to enter into your work orders and find yourself wanting to use something very fast for data entry (like a spreadsheet).

BigWave gives you the flexibility to enter your pricing both ways!

If you want to use a spreadsheet to enter your pricing data, follow these steps:

1. Download and save to your hard drive a pricing sheet from the import/export center for the project.
2. Open the exported spreadsheet in Excel.
3. Highlight all the exported rows and clear the data.  Leave the column headers however.
4. Enter your pricing detail.  For each row at a minimum you must specify a work order number in column A, a Category, a Quantity, and a Unit Price.
5. When you are finished, simply import the pricing spreadsheet you just created back into your project.

BigWave shines for multi-site projects.  This topic describes the different options available to add sites into your project.

Sites are associated to a project from the master list of site records belonging to the project’s customer.  As various projects are executed on an individual site a project history is built for the site record.

There are three methods you may use to associate your sites.

• ‘Use the master list from the customer’

  Presents a list of available sites and enables you to choose individual sites to associate to the project.

• ‘Manually enter site ID’s’

  Enables you to specify sites to associate by site ID.  These IDs may be copied/pasted into BigWave directly from Excel.

• The third option is available via the Import/Export center ‘Import sites’ option. This advanced option enables you to not only associate sites, but in the same step upload a spreadsheet containing site data including Requested Date, address details, and site level custom fields.

A question came up the other day from a user.  “How can I find work orders that are unassigned?”.  Turns out with the new work order search facility in BigWave, this is very easy to do.

Simply search on the ‘Assigned To’ field for ‘Has no value entered’.  This returns all work orders that are not assigned.  If you choose ‘Has a value entered’ work orders that are assigned will be returned.

The monthly project performance graph shows by month the number of sites that were scheduled in that timeframe vs how many of those have been completed.  Completed is defined by the status set to a ‘Closed’ state.

So, if you have scheduled 3 sites with Scheduled Dates in June, but only 2 have been completed, the graph will show ‘2 of 3′.  It doesn’t matter if the current date is not in June, the chart shows what sites have been scheduled in a month vs completed.

The dates are driven by the project’s scheduled start and end dates.  So adjusting those values will cause more or less rows of months to appear in this report.

When should I use a custom field to track a date vs. tracking the date in the schedule grid?

This is a question that often comes up.  There are typically many dates that need to be tracked in a project.  However, in BigWave, only dates that need to be watched for milestone and tracking purposes should be tracked in your schedule.  A good rule of thumb is if the date is important enough that if “missed”, then you need to know about it, then that is a milestone you will want to track as part of your WBS in the schedule grid.  All of the BigWave reporting/alerting functionality works around dates in the WBS, so any dates captured in a custom field will not be scanned by BigWave for this purpose.

Let’s take an example.  For our project we must deliver documentation for each site worked.  We want to track the fact that documentation was indeed delivered and what the date was for when that occurred.

If we want to put this “Documentation Delivered” date into our project plan, then it would fall somewhere towards the end of the WBS for the site and we could track a schedule date and actual date for this event occurring.  This is workable when we can actually schedule the date for when the documentation will be delivered.

However this example is different.  The site documentation comes from many different sources several of which we don’t have direct control on when we will receive it.  Our job is to compile it all and forward it to the customer.  Since it is difficult to give this event a “scheduled date”, we simply choose to create a custom field that will hold the actual date when the documentation is actually delivered.

Typically it is fairly obvious when a date falls into the schedule, but sometimes a date needs to be tracked and only its value is significant as a data point.  In these cases a custom field is the better choice.