Monday, August 21, 2006

Understanding the Offline Browser...

I've worked this afternoon with the Changepoint Offline Browser to get a better understanding of its capabilities and how it will work for our team.

Straight from the user guide, the following are the defined functionalities of Changepoint's Offline Browser...

The following functions are available when working offline:

  • Task status updates
  • Time booking for any task you are assigned, as well as non-project time.
  • Time submission
  • Create expenses for any project for which you have a task assignment or are the Project Manager
  • Ability to save certain online reports and profile pages for offline viewing
  • View the resource profiles of all or a selected group of resources in Changepoint
  • View customer and contact profiles based on those included in your My Contacts list in Changepoint Browser
  • Create new company and contact records and maintain existing records
  • View project profiles for projects that are related to your task assignments
  • View task profiles for tasks that are related to your task assignments
  • An Offline Browser Home Page with notifications of items requiring your attention
  • Create new opportunities and maintain existing records

Breaking that down, what is the real functionality of the Offline Browser? I would define it as four functions - people, task reporting, expense reporting, and historical review.

People
There are three subjects related to people. My Contacts - which displays information about project contacts - useful for keeping work related data out of your palm pilot. Resources - essentially the same thing as My Contacts but for internal company contacts such as your fellow consultants - again, useful for keeping work related data out of your palm pilot. Finally there's the Opportunities - which displays information relating to sales and forecasting opportunities for a given company (not something we use in project management).

Task Reporting
The most useful of the tools from a management perspective is task reporting and there are two two utilities built into the Offline Browser to support the gathering of the necessary information. First is the Task List which allows the consultant to report on tasks assigned. The consultant can modify the hours remaining on a task either by project percentage or in hours. Additionally, the consultant can change the forecasted start or finish. Finally, the consultant can freely add critical comments about the task.

The second Task Reporting tool is the Time Sheet for time reporting against a project. The program works fairly smoothly in allowing the consultant to pick the project, assign the time, and apply a description of the services rendered. My only complaint is there may be a bug / system process issue when applying time and then reporting the project status as complete. My testing shows that the hours roll over in the time reporting at the task level but not at the project level which to me is a bug. I'll confirm with the Changepoint folks.

Expense Reporting
The most useful tool from a consultant's perspective - gotta get paid! The Expenses tool allows the consultant to add their expenses against the project. Works in the exact same fashion as the online version of the Changepoint software.

Historical Review
This Saved Reports tool is an oxymoron - it can be the most interesting, the worst feature, the best feature - all depending upon your perspective and if the data is or isn't there. When utilizing Changepoint live and on-line the consultant will see a new icon light up - it's the picture of the floppy disk (like anyone actually uses floppy disks!) with down arrow. At this point a "picture" of the current html data can be taken and downloaded into a repository that will transfer into the Offline Browser's Saved Reports. Note that this is not always a saved report but can be an activity or a tree view. The pros - the data is there to review when offline. The cons - a very limited number html screens can be saved and the data is static - it can't be updated in the Offline Browser. My biggest frusturation is why the limited number of screen captures - as the entire product is an html page - why can't the user select any data to download as a couple of key pieces of info important to the consultants in the way we work would not be available.

I'll be performing some additional tests and working from the Offline Browser as much as possible over the next week and then introduce it to the consultant team the following week. There's enough positive benefits that the Offline Browser should become a productive tool.

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