Forum OpenACS Q&A: Project Management Capability in OpenACS?

I am investigating funding the development of a basic project management reporting module using OpenACS.

The goal would not to be re-create applications such as MS Project, but to have an application module that allows easy tracking of the key items associated with each project and the types of activities which would normally be overseen by a Project Management Office.

* Project Charter
* Budget
* Risks
* Issues Log
* Work Breakdown Structure
* Roles and Responsibilities
* Assumptions & Constraints
* Communication Plan

I am assuming that we would need develop these from scratch. Has any work been done on project management capability in OpenACS? Are there are others who are interested in moving the PM agenda along?

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Al,

There is a project-manager package in OpenACS that may cover quite a few or all of your requirements. I haven't used it personally but here is a link to a page describing the effort

https://openacs.org/projects/dotwrk/project_management/

There is also a dotlrn portlet to integrate project manager data into a dotlrn portal.

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Posted by Matthew Burke on
You also might want to take a look at Project Open (http://project-open.com). They have a project management module for OpenACS, although I don't know what functionality it provides.
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Posted by Robert Taylor on
alfred, if you are going to be doing any work on project open, please base it on the current project manager software.

we are going to start using it as is soon and work on improving it as we move forward.

clearly if you were to work on the pm software it self, we would be able to co-ordinate with you and reduce any duplication that may occur.

please post when you guys have had a chance to look at pm and what your thoughts are on moving forward.

i would be very interested in speaking with your team further on this.

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Posted by Robert Taylor on
allow me to rephrase one statement:

from:
"please base it on the current project manager software."

to:
"please CONSIDER basing your project on the current pm software"

heh, my statement was far too declerative.

do let us know what you guys decide though, lots of people are interested in projecte manager software working right.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Hi Al, three of our clients as well as ourself are using the project manager in various degrees with and without workflow integration. It is currently targeted to be used by agencies and consulting companies, meaning you can run a project, see how many hours have been spend on it, integrate it with invoicing so you could write invoices out of it.

From what you are describing here are certain things that would need to be developed.

- Support for hourly rates, so logger entries could be directly transfered into the budget, which could be run through the invoicing module
- Issues Log = Tasks of Type Issue and then look at the history of all tasks in the project?
- I would probably write up the risks in a Wiki and include the Wiki portlet on the project manager overview page or someplace close to it.
- Frank is sponsoring integration of Gantt Software into OpenACS as part of P/O. Once this is done it should be straightforward to implement this for OpenACS Project Manager as well.
- Roles and Rssponsibilities already exists, though you probably need to ammend the roles to your liking.
- As for the last two, again a Wiki seems like a good strategy, though communication can happen through comments as well.

So hopefully this gives you an idea and shows that you won't necessarily have to build everything from scratch and obviously we would be interested in your work and build upon it as well as collaborate.

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Posted by Robert Taylor on
oh frank is having the gantt stuff done? nice.

chances are he is going to do the same thing most other projects are and just spit out a graphic gantt display.

somewhere down the line then we will try to add svg support to their effort to get some interactivity (we don't support msie any more). perhaps as something that one can turn on/off in the preferences as per user need.

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Posted by Frank Bergmann on
Hi,

Malte is right. We've got a GanttProject integration working in our recent V3.2.Beta1 release of ]project-open[. Please check our SourceForge site http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/ and check the "Support Files" section (not the main download section!) for the beta release. It also comes with a PostgreSQL dump for Pg 8.0.1 for a jump-start. I'm not sure whether we've GPLed the stuff or not, but you can go grab it, adapt it to Project Manager, and release the result under the GPL.

However, I'm not sure that it's going to be a big help. Creating and parsing GanttProject's XML is actually quite straight forward. But we had to modify the semantics of our Project/Subproject/Tasks hierarchical structure to deal with a lot of semantic differences. For example, GanttProject allows you to "fully delete" a task, while there may still be timesheet information, discussions or invoices associated with it.

chances are he is going to do the same thing most other
projects are and just spit out a graphic gantt display.

Hi Robert. (Un-?)Fortunately, that's not the case. We found in usability tests that "normal" project managers (without previous exposure to OpenACS 😊) were unable to maintain a "normal" project structure (a few tenth of tasks) using a Web interface. Also, we've seen negative feedback that dotProject got for its Gantt integration. It's basicly useless for real companies and has been named by several customers as a reason not to go with dotProject.

This is why we went for the integrated GanttProject Java application. Still, I've heard from customers that it's difficult to do any serious resource planning with it. Maybe we should go and integrate some kind of Excel sheet... Maybe somebody has seen a reasonable Spread Sheet applet, please?

* Project Charter
* Budget
* Risks
* Issues Log
* Work Breakdown Structure
* Roles and Responsibilities
* Assumptions & Constraints
* Communication Plan

We've got basicly all of that, plus "project controlling" (using a "compound cost model" to calculate profit & loss for each project), "resource planning" (with the final V3.2 release) and "reporting" (a kind of Crystal Reports with grouped reports and a reporting engine).

Admittedly, most of the stuff above is not GPLed, but provided under a free (as in beer) license. Please see my posting history for in-dept discussions and opinions from leading OpenACS community members about it. We are trying to go a "middle way", with a professional product-development pipeline while still upholding the ideas behind open-source.

Reporting is even commercial software, as well as a GAAP/IAS compliant auditing, a SAP interface and a number of other packages that are only useful for companies with 50+ employees. And frankly, I don't feel bad to charge these companies a license fee. They would be very surprised if we wouldn't, and probably wouldn't trust us. The first Fortune-1000-subsidy customers have gone live with ]po[ recently and they praise our model as a reasonable mix suitable for both small and big companies.

So, I would encourage everybody to have a look at our stuff and check it out. For an end-user it feels like real open-source software with community, patches, free extensions, etc. And as a consultant/integrator (somebody who needs to squeeze money out of a customer...) you may appreciate the professional product and our support that's going to open you a lot of doors.

Cheers,
Frank

mailto:frank_dot_bergmann@project_dash_open.com
http://www.project-open.com/

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Posted by Robert Taylor on
neat stuff.

thanks for the heads up frank.