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!

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.

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.

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.

What are the keys to choosing the correct level for my project?

You must tell BigWave what level you need to run your project.  If you have a simple task to accomplish for each site in the project, then the “Work Order” level may be the best choice.  If you have a few important milestones to track for each project then the “Activity” level may be the best choice (as in the example above).  If you have sub-milestones to track for each major milestone, then the “Task” level may be the best choice.  Most projects are run on the “Activity” level.

If you are unsure which level to choose, the best method is to start with the highest level “Work Order” and see if that gives sufficient enough detail to meet the demands of the project.  If more milestones need to be tracked, then move down a level and see if that will fit.  You may change your level as the project is worked, so if you start with “Activity”, and halfway through the project you need to use “Tasks”, then you have the flexibility to change on the fly.