Project plan

Project plan module

The project plan was designed to facilitate the resource planning of a project by giving the project leader the ability to keep track of estimated hours on a project, and the hours that have actually been spent on certain predefined tasks and activities. It allows the project leader to continuously keep track of timesheet registrations and how these hours compare to estimated hours on a project.

Planning in practice

The planning of a project in Moment can be initiated by choosing an existing project and then creating an activity. When an activity is created, the user can enter the amount of estimated hours that will be spent on the specific activity from the project planner.

By clicking on the gear icon on the right corner in the Project Plan tab, the user will be able to click on the option to “show estimated hours on activities”. By selecting this option, the user will be able to see the estimated hours in the column “estimated” as they compare to the timesheet input from each co-worker. At the same time, the user will be able to delegate hours as they see fit in the planning schedule. By clicking on the same gear icon on the right, the user can choose to see “earlier reserved hours” (marked in red below):

If this setting is selected, the available hours for the specific coworker will be shown in the project plan. This gives the project manager the opportunity to avoid overbooking. See the screenshot below:

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In the project plan schedule, it is possible to assign hours for each co-worker. The hour allocation is decided on a weekly basis, with each square representing one week. Each week is represented by its number in the corresponding year. To see the exact dates for each corresponding week, just hover the mouse pointer over the week number, a tooltip will appear that shows the date for the beginning and the ending of the week.

Once the user has chosen the respective squares, the amount of hours can be defined by just writing the number in the square that represents the week of your choice. The total amount of hours allocated from the Project Plan interface will be shown in the column Forecast to the right of the respective row in the Project Plan interface. The amount of hours allocated to the activity from the project plan interface will in turn be compared to the “estimated” column just next to it. If you have clicked on the option to see Differences in the project plan interface, these will be shown to the right of it in the next row. These planned hours will be compared to the hours that the co-worker has registered in its timesheet, in turn these hours will be checked against the estimated hours. If the co-worker has registered less hours than have been estimated for a certain activity, Moment will not register them as a Difference, hence these will not be shown in red once you hover the mouse pointer over the column that shows.

If a co-worker in the project registers more hours than what has been allocated by the project manager, these hours will show both in the project plan screen as red numbers, and in the co-workers hour-registration window.

In this example, the co-worker has been allocated 8 hours to perform a certain activity in week 8. If, for instance, the co-worker logs in more hours in that specific week than the amount that has been allocated. This will show in red both in the project planner and the hour registration window. As seen in the screenshots below.

From the hour-registration window

From the project-plan window

In the example above, it is clear the the amount of hours logged is greater than the amount allocated. This will be shown as a deviation both in the project-plan and in the hour registration window. It is worth mentioning that in the project plan, the amount of allocated hours is replaced by the actual amount of hours logged for that activity if the coworker logs more hours than originally allocated.

If the co-workers register more hours than have been estimated for that activity they will get a prompt in their timesheet registration that they will now be registering more hours than have been estimated for that activity. Depending on the settings chosen, the co-worker will either get a warning that the hours registered exceed the allocated amount and be allowed to register these, or get a prompt warning and not be allowed to register.

The following settings are found in Setup > settings > projects:

The rest of the settings in the screenshot above, show different options such as sending an e-mail when hours are exceeded, to show planned hours in the timesheet interface itself, or to add any projects in the timesheet if any registrations are found in the selected period.

Reservations (project > reservations)

The reservations screen in Moment is used to make tentative changes to the week by week hour allocation for each coworker in a project. You can choose to either see the hour allocation on a coworker-basis, or on a project basis. The screen is also divided in weeks, similar to the project plan picture. In this screen you can also see the dates corresponding for each week. See the picture below:

If we mark to show reservations for each coworker and for hours, this gives the following overview:

In this example, the coworker Adam has been allocated 20 hours to work on the project “Delplan sjøområde”. The highlighted red square shows the amount of hours reserved for that coworker in week 8. 20 hours have been booked for that week, the remaining 13 hours have not been allocated yet. The total number of hours, 33, amount to the total hours specified on Adam’s employment page.

The highlighted green square shows the hours as they have been allocated in the project plan module. As we can see, the twenty hours marked in blue correspond with the twenty hours as they have been assigned in the project module. If a project manager wishes to see how many hours have been reserved, and hence, how many are available, the manager can just look them up on the reservation window.

This opens the possibility to make changes in the reservation screen. These changes could be to make tentative changes to the available and reserved hours for each worker.

The following picture shows an example the reservation window and what it looks like when changes have been made to it:

In this example, I decided to make tentative changes to Adam’s allocated hours on the Delplan Sjøområdet project by clicking on the small pencil icon on the right. I decided to change the allocated hours from twenty to fourteen. As you can see, my changes are marked in red, while the existent hours from the project plan are in blue and are crossed by a line, indicating that they are no longer valid. When all the changes have been made to the allocation of hours, the next step would be to go to the project plan and change the actual allocation of hours there.

The following screenshot shows how Adam’s available hours change after we have adjusted his allocated hours down to fourteen from twenty:

Now the allocated number of hours is changed and corrected, showing the same amount of hours, both in red and in blue.

If you don't want to see the changes made in the reservation window, you can untick this setting on the top right corner of the reservation window:

This setting is turned on by default and there is no company or user-setting that allows for it to be unticked as standard.

We can conclude that changes made in the project plan will reflect on the reservations overview. However this is not to say that changes in the reservation overview will in turn feed on to the project plan. This is important. The point of the reservation plan is both to give a quick overview of available hours and at the same time to give the possibility to make quick changes to the reservation overview.