Project Closure Process w/the Process Engine

[Robert_Ensinger]

Hi all.
I know there have already been a couple threads around this here in the forums already. Pardon me while I start another one fresh - if I can't find a good solution I plan to convert this to an Idea.

Our project closure process is executed manually by our PMs today. For ease of use and quality reasons we'd like to provide them a 'one click' experience to accomplish their project closures tasks. We think this is a good business problem for an on-demand process to solve.

PMs need to:
Zero out remaining ETCs & Allocations.
Release resources (where applicable/capable).
Ensure all tasks and milestones are marked complete.
Close the project for time entry.
Change the Progress to 'Completed'.

...these are just some of our closure activities, I'm sure there are others.

Q1: Does anyone have an automated project closure process today that they find successful & valuable? If so, how is this architected? Willing to share?

Ideally, I'd like to stay away from stored procedures, direct database updates and big honkin' gels, xogs and xml transforms. I'd like to be able to achieve this with the process engine using GUI tools such as System Actions.

Please let me know if you have anything to share on this. If you have other closure activities you'd like to get on the bus as new System Actions, please reply and enumerate them as well.

Thanks!
-R

[Anon Anon]

Q1 : No - the PMO have asked for one of these though, I tell them I can build it if they give me the budget.... => impasse.

I would think you can build it all with GEL/XOG, without ever resorting to SPs though - should just be able to XOG out the project, transform it with some XML manipulation shenanigans and XOG it in again - easy! (ok maybe not).

Builds? : How about an "undo" option to cope with people running the process "accidentally" (you KNOW that will happen :sad ).

[Robert_Ensinger]

Dave, thanks for confirming that people want this and that it requires real development skills to deliver from the tool today (time and $$$).

Some System Actions dedicated to these data management tasks would go a long way towards empowering us mortal process developers to model their organization's business process in the tool. If anyone feels this would be of value to their organization, please click on and promote [size=5]Project Closure Process System Actions[size].

[Anon Anon]

Hello Rob

We have a fairly simple process for project closure. We have a custom attribute that stores (based on a lookup) the different project states. And we have a process that checks the a percent complete field that maps the project percent complete from the tasks. The project goes to the state "FINISHED" only when the percent complete field is set to 1 (100%). We also save the date where the project was finished in another attribute (very simple gel script).

Regarding the other actions we don't do any automated processes. we just check randomly if they were done on time and "discipline" our managers if they are misbehaving :vader:

hope it helps

Rafa

[Shelby Harman]

I'm not able to vote for this solution using the link.

[David Morton]

^ that is a link to a no-longer-used ideation platform. The CA (now Broadcom) process for ideas is very different.

[Shelby Harman]

I've been trying to set-up something similar and hopefully simpler via the processes, but I'm stuck.

I'm wanting the PM to change the Work status to Cancelled or Complete, and have a process automatically trigger (on update) to change the Financial Status to Closed and Open For Time Entry on the Project to be No.

I'm able to turn off time entry when Work Status = Complete, but now I'm not able to edit it to add the other pieces. What am I doing wrong? 

I'm also thinking I should change the Start Option to ON-demand, because I'm running into issues with it set to Auto-start on Update. But is there a way to schedule a process?

[Alistair Miller]

I did this, but there are no system actions to do what you want so I had to write GEL to XOG-update the project.

We limited it so that only the PMO team could kick off the process.  The business process was:

• PM updates the (OOTB) Status field to 'Completed'
• Custom portlet available to PMO team showed all projects where the status had been updated to Completed
• PMO team member goes into each project and selects 'Close This Project' from the project's Actions drop-down.
• Process fires in Clarity to close the project:
  • Set Project Finish Date to Last Updated Date, Approved status to False, Closed status to True, Financial Status to C, Open for Time Entry to False
  • For each Task: remove any ETC, set Open for Time Entry to False, set Percent Complete to 1, Finish Date to Project Finish Date, Task status to Complete
  • For each Allocation: remove any future Allocations or Hard Allocations, set Allocation Finish date to Project Finish date or Resource Date of Termination, set Open for Time Entry to False
  • set Project Active status to No

It would be much easier if these could be handled via System Actions rather than XOG.