Multi-Project and Process Management

[ruediklein]

Hi,

I am looking for a low-cost system to experiment with combining our process management with our project management needs. xProcess looks promising to help us figure out our concrete requirements.

In one tutorial, it was shown, that in order for the resource prioritization among project to work, they would all have to be put into one project. If that is so, does that automatically mean, that all projects would have to follow the same process?

The background for the question is that we have product development projects at different levels of functional safety (ASIL A - D) and that means the processes differ among projects. We still use the same developers across projects though and need to prioritize their work.

Best Regards,

Ruedi

[Andy Carmichael]

Hi Ruedi

You are correct (using xProcess's definition of project and process). You must assign a defined amount of time (absolute or percentage) to each "xprocess-project" in xProcess. This is to enable independent scheduling of xprocess-projects.

Where you want to prioritise items from different "company-projects" against each other and use xProcess to schedule the resources according to these priorities, you need to define the company-projects as Folders or Parent-Tasks rather than xprocess-projects. Again the xprocess-process used by this "super project" will need to incorporate all the aspects used by the individual company-projects (though you could potentially limit which process elements were used in different parent tasks using the "composite task" feature).

In fact using a process based on the supplied "Simple Process" will get you a good way down the line. As different company-projects add features to this process they will be available to the others if they want to use them.

Hope this helps.

Andy