Let’s talk about further customizing your projects in Graceful Efforts. After adapting the UI to your team’s workflows, it’s time to choose a way to manage the project and, depending on that, activate some of the features you might need.
The project settings are either on or off, and most of them start by being inactive. The only exception is the first one, which we’ll review right now.
Task autonomy
This option allows all the team members to add, edit and delete tasks for any Deliverable, in any Stage or Work Package. It exists so that the team can adapt and function without always asking for the project manager to add tasks. Most projects work like this, but for the rare cases where the project manager needs a tighter control on things, this setting can be disabled. If disabled, only the project owner, the project manager and the work package owner can add and manage tasks.
Feedback from the team
This option allows the team members to add comments to the following pages: project, Stage, Work Package, Deliverable and task. The intended purpose for this feature is not to replace dedicated chat software such as Slack, but instead, to ensure discussions stay on point. Once a few comments have been added to a page, the project manager should draw a conclusion and update the page with that conclusion.
For instance, if a few project team members debate a certain deliverable, once the debate reaches a conclusion, that deliverable should be updated to reflect the discussion. New tasks can also be added based on the insights in the comments. Finally, the comments may be deleted, so that future conversations are not cluttered by previous discussions.
Cost management
This option enables the following advanced features: cost breakdown structure, costs, expenses, budget, earned value management. Not all projects need to have their finances managed here, so by default this is disabled to keep things simple. Upon activating this option, all the deliverables (or however you decide to name your scope chunks) gain some buttons to add, edit and delete costs and expenses. This will be the raw data that will be used to power all the other Cost management features.
The team management page allows the project manager to control which team member may view the financial information. Only the Project Manager may edit financial information.
Work Packages (or whatever you named your scope groups)
Allow grouping of Deliverables into Work Packages, so that larger parts of the project can be delegated to a team member (or subcontractor). The Work Packages may have an owner, other than the Project Manager. The Work Package owner may mark Deliverables as finished or unfinished, change tasks durations, owners and delete tasks. Tasks become bound to the Work Package duration.
MoSCoW prioritization
Prioritize Deliverables inside a Stage (or Work Package) as must have, should have, could have or won't have. You may ignore won't have, as you may simply not include certain Deliverables into a Stage or Work Package. This is a way to show the team what to focus on, without having to manage all the details. Naturally, in the current Stage the team will focus first on the must have deliverables, and so on in the order of their priority.
Milestones
Add milestones to the progress page, so you can easily keep track of important commitments and deadlines. Milestones are a very good way to handle external constraints, because they are handled independently and are simply names for their calendar dates. Remember to use them instead of treating a Task, Work Package or Stage’s planned finish as a deadline - those are not deadlines, but parts of your project plan.
Collections
Create collections of items like risks, bugs, issues or anything else that's not a Deliverable but you still need to track it. Graceful Efforts implements the major project management techniques that are useful for most projects, but each organization and team has unique things they prefer or need to track in their day to day work. This feature is meant to allow you to model whatever you need for your projects and make the software adapt to your work style, instead of the other way around.