Project Online (or Project Server) should be configured, not
to say customized, in a way that it supports your business principles and
procedures around Project Management. It should reflect your (probably tailor
made) Project Management methodology. The first thing you generally do is to
configure your way of doing project plans, by creating your own Enterprise
Custom Fields and Lookup Tables that would be used together with your custom
views.
Moving forward, your Project Management methodology might
contain a method to manage risks and issues. This post is about configuring
your own Project Online instance to match your Risk and Issue Management
methodology. I choose the Issue list as an example but the same applies to
Risks or Documents. Note that identical approach can be used for any custom
features such as change requests, decisions log, assumptions and constraints…
Approach
The implementation relies on the usage of SharePoint Content
Types. You can find more information on this topic reading: Introduction to Content Types on MSDN. Content Types, being
centrally managed, can be easily updated to reflect your methodology changes,
and those changes can be applied to any existing Project Site (avoiding to ask
you poor dev team to manually update all project site lists after any changes).
The trick is to
update the existing Risk or Issue Content Types (or create your own),
understanding that Project Online relies on some fields of those content types.
It means that you should never delete
any of the existing fields. If you remove some fields (aka the trap of the beginner),
the publish process may throw an error. Even for SharePoint dev superheroes,
it’s very complex to recreate those fields (it’s not just a story of recreating
the fields with the same names). You cannot delete fields, but you can create
new ones or hide some of the existing.
If you are not familiar with this, here is a step by step procedure
to create your own Issue Content Type and use it in Project Online.
86 comments :
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.