If you’ve followed the steps of the a.c.pro Quick Start guide in order, you have so far created your organization and at least a few users. Now you are ready to create your first project so you can get to work.
The a.c.pro welcome screen includes a "Projects" link, which is where you’ll want to go to create a new project. Then, at the Projects screen, click the "New Project" button. This brings up the New Project screen, where you fill-in some of the basic information concerning your project.
This is screen has several options, but since we are doing a Quick Start, we are just going to look at a few of the fields that you need to set in order to get your project going. To use a realistic example, we will enter the details for a quality assurance project and explain the purpose of each field as follows:
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Name
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Type your project’s name here. In our example, we will create a project to track quality assurance issues, so we will simply call the project "Quality Assurance". Note that this is really the only required field: if you are in a big hurry to start adding items to your project, you can fill in a name here and click "Save" right away. |
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Comment
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Any comment you type here will appear next to the project name in the project list (the list you see if you click "Projects" from the welcome screen.) |
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Project Status
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Active or Inactive -- you’re creating a new project that you want to use right away, so you would leave this at "active." |
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Description
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You can type a longer description of your project here. It will appear at the top of the project’s main screen, which you will see if you click the project name from the project list. For our quality assurance project example, we’ve added a short blurb to remind our employees why we have this project and how important it is. |
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Deadlines (Automatic/Mandatory)
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There are a few important settings regarding deadlines. As you and other users create items for your project, you will probably want a default deadline to be applied to each item. That way, if the user who enters the item does not explicitly set a deadline, a.c.pro will set one so that the item does not get forgotten. Just fill in the number of days in the future on which you want the deadline to be scheduled. Also, you can indicate whether you want deadlines to be mandatory or not. If you select "Yes" for the "Deadlines are mandatory" option, an item cannot be saved in the project if it does not include a deadline. This rule will apply until the item is put into a "finished" status -- more about that later when we talk about item statuses. |
That’s enough fields to fill out for our Quick Start. Click "OK" to save the new project.
Now you are at your project’s opening screen, where you will be taken whenever you click the project name in a project list. This screen shows you the name of the project, the description you entered above, the list of project items (there should be none because you just created the project), and a set of menu buttons that you can use to create project items and sub-projects, view project properties, etc.
Before you go on to enter items, we will make a few more adjustments to this new project.
Later, when you enter and update items in your project, you can set those items to a particular status. This section will help you define the list of statuses that you and other users will see and choose from when editing an item.
While viewing the project, click the "Properties" menu button to view the project’s properties. This properties screen looks just about the same as the screen you used to create the project, except now, on the left side, is a set of menu buttons to access other properties that we have not yet considered.
Click the "Status" menu button. This shows you the list of defined item statuses for your project.
a.c.pro starts you off with a few by default, as you see in the graphic here. As you can tell by their names ("Not a bug", "Unreproducable"), some of these pre-defined statuses are geared towards software support issues. But you can re-name or delete them, as well as create others.
To change the name of a status code, just click it to view its properties, and then re-type the name.
If you want to completely delete a status, click it to view its properties, then click the "Delete" button.
If you want to create an entirely new status, click the "New" button and fill-out the properties.
Here’s a quick overview of the Status properties:
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Name |
The name of the status, such as "Open", "Resolved", etc. When a user is working on a project item, the status name will appear in the list of available statuses. |
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Assign to user |
If you wish, you can make it such that any project item that is set to this status will be automatically reassigned to a specific user. For example, if you have one project member who is dedicated to testing, you could create a status called "Ready for testing" and select that project member in the "Assign to user" list. Then whenever someone sets a project item to "Ready for testing", it will automatically be assigned to your tester. |
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Final |
If you check this box, you are indicating that any project item set to this status will be considered to be completed. That way a.c.pro will not consider it pending or overdue. |
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Comment required |
If you check this box, users who set a project item to this status must also type in a comment. A good example for using this is if you have a vague final status such as "No longer relevant". Instead of letting users just set an item to "No longer relevant" so that it is no longer pending, you can make them type a comment to explain their decision. |
When you have finished setting up your statuses, click "Back" to return to the Project Properties screen, then click "Save" to make sure your changes are saved.
Since you just created your project, you are so far the only user who can access it. To give access to other users in your organization, again click the "Properties" button while viewing the project. Then click the "Access" button. You’re then shown the list of people who already have access (just yourself) and the list of people to whom you can grant access.
Select the users to whom you wish to grant access, then click OK to save your changes.
In this part of the a.c.pro Quick Start guide, you accomplished the following:
Your project is ready to use. Now see "Quick Start: Working with Project Items" for an overview of creating and using project items in a.c.pro.
