June 2020 Release Notes

21st June 2020 Patch Release

NEW FEATURE: Fiscal Year Budget Variance

Tracking your budget variance is now easier thanks to the changes made to the project financials component. You can now see at a glance the baseline and the full year forecast variances from the fiscal year budget.

Note that we have renamed 'Approved' budget to 'Baseline' budget based on the user feedback we have received.

NEW FEATURE: New Resource Reporting page

The new reporting page allows you to see the health of the projects by portfolio and project types but also displays the resource full year forecast allocation as well as the project schedule. 

BUG FIXES

• Amending an action with a single assignee was not displaying the assignee name
• Code has been hardened to prevent assignees to be duplicated when creating or editing an action
• Additional validation has been added when saving the project details
• Fixed an issue that we introduced in last release where board members could not add attachments to the tasks they were assigned to and assignees who were not part of the board could not open the tasks. 

15th June 2020 Patch Release

NEW FEATURE: Reporting Program Project Search

It is now possible to create a watchlist that includes all projects that are part of the same reporting program. Simply set the Reporting Program field value to the reporting program you want to create the watchlist for and click Save!

ENHANCEMENT: Action percentage completion slider can be set to any amount

Until now, the percentage completion slider on the action dialog could only be set to 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. Client feedback was that users wanted to be able to set any value so we removed the restriction on the slider. 

BUG FIXES

• Create Action code has been hardened to prevent duplicate assignees.
• Fixed the display of the Assigned To field value on Action dialog.
• Fixed User Activity Export to Excel functionality.
• Uploading an empty file does no longer raise an exception.
• Fixed Archive Project functionality.

8th June 2020 Release

The main focus of this release has been to improve the user experience and make the content easy to access. You will therefore notice quite a few layout changes.

We have also improved the Export to Word/PowerPoint functionality as well as making it easier to request access to projects, meetings, workhubs or boards you do not have access to.

Release Notes Content

1. User Experience Improvement
2. Export to Word / PowerPoint
3. Projects / Meetings / WorkHubs / Boards Access Request
4. What else?

User Experience Improvement

NEW PROJECT WORKSPACE LAYOUT

The project workspace page layout has been redesigned to improve the page navigation and make the content easier to access.

1. New left hand navigation bar
   • The vertical navigation bar allows you to quickly jump to the section you want to navigate to. 
   • The number against each section represents the number of items in the section, therefore making it easy to see at a glance which section has content.  
   • The Tools section gives you an easy access to the reporting and bulk edit functionalities. 
2. New Project Details section
   • The project details section at the top of the page has been redesigned to better highlight the key project information.
   • The spanner tool to edit the project details has been removed and replaced by the 'Edit Details' button. The button is only visible if the logged in user has the rights to edit the project.
3. Community section
   • The community section on parent project or program's workspace now displays the resource allocation per project instead of aggregating the allocation. This is to allow you to see easily which project resources are allocated to.

NEW WORKHUB PAGE LAYOUT

The WorkHub page layout has also been redesigned and includes a few improvements.

1. New left hand navigation bar
   • As for the project workspace, the vertical navigation bar allows you to quickly jump to the section you want to navigate to and see at a glance the number of items per section. 
   • The Tools section gives you an easy access to the reporting functionalities. 
2. Editing the WorkHub details is now more intuitive thanks to the 'Edit' button.
3. The display of the projects and meetings linked to the WorkHub has also been improved to make them easier to read and use.

NEW BOARD PAGE LAYOUT

1. New CREATE BOARD page
   • The Create Board page has been redesigned to simplify the board creation process. You can now create the board and set the board columns and themes in a single step.
   • Helper text with link to help articles have also been added to answer any questions you may have.

2. New board page layout
   
   • New toolbar to easily access the different setting options and functionalities.
   • Click anywhere on the card to drag the card to another column.
   • Click on the pencil to edit a card.

DOCUMENTS COMPONENT

1. Drag and drop functionality has been added to the document upload dialog. Just drag the document you want to upload into the 'Drag File to Upload' area.
   
   

2. The Documents component displayed has been redesigned with more user friendly icons and tooltips.

ACTION DIALOGS

All dialogs have been revisited to make it easier to capture data and navigate to the section you need.

Improvements include:

1. The primary buttons (Save, Delete or Close) are now always in the view.
2. Scrollbar has been added to facilitate the dialog navigation.
3. Left hand menu allows you to jump to the section you need easily.

Export to Word / PowerPoint

The Export to Word / PowerPoint functionality has been improved to provide more flexibility when building report templates. It is now also possible to export PowerPoint reports from a watchlist. 

1. Including a report for each sub project

If the project you are exporting the report for is a program or parent project, you can now select to iterate the same template through all projects in the hierarchy. The generated report will then include a full report for each project in the hierarchy.

To iterate the same template through each sub project, you need to select the checkbox to generate a combined report before clicking on the Download button.

2. Repeating slides for each subproject

If you are using PowerPoint to build your project report template, it is possible to indicate if a slide should be repeated and applied to each project in the hierarchy.

As an example, you can build a PowerPoint template that has a cover page, some slides specific to the parent project you running the template from and slides that are applied to each project in the hierarchy. You may want for instance to have a status report slider a key milestones slide for each sub project. An example of a template using repeating slides is attached to this article.

To learn more about this feature, click here.

3. Building a project status table

If you are exporting the project report from a watchlist or a program / parent project, you can now generate a report with the project status of all projects listed in one table. Learn more about this feature here.

Projects / Meetings / WorkHubs / Boards Access Request

Until now, if you tried to access a project, meeting or workhub you did not have permission to, you were presented with a permission denied page that had no information about what to do to request access.

In order for this page to no longer be a dead end, we are now including the names of the owners of the project, meeting or workhub you are trying to access as well as a Request Access functionality. 

Selecting the Request Access button will result in an action being sent to meeting, project or workhub you are trying to access to let the owners know you would like to have access. If you are trying to access a board, the action will be sent to the board owner.

What else?

Upcoming Meetings

• You can easily access all your meetings by selecting My Meetings button from the Upcoming Meetings component on the homepage.
• The filter to change the date range for your upcoming meetings has been moved to the left.

Active Projects

• You can see the list of the projects you manage or are allocated to by simply clicking on My Projects button from the Active Projects component on the homepage.

Project workspace

• You no longer have to navigate to the Project Gantt page to delete a schedule task. The task can now be deleted directly from the project workspace.
• You can now see the location, portfolio and cost centre of the resources you want to allocate to the project.

User record

• You can now assign a portfolio to a user record.