Project Engine

A Versatile Solution

The general nature of Project Engine makes it a versatile solution that can be used for many purposes. Some of them are described below:

Managing Tasks and Assignments

Project Engine is basically a task manager where each task is assigned to a user or a role. Tasks are arranged in a hierarchy of parent tasks and subtasks. A single task can have any number of children and each child may in turn have any number of children.

Handling Personal or Public To-Do Lists

All users have their own to-do list. The main goal for each team member is to complete the tasks in the to-do list. The to-do list only contains the activities that needs to be performed next, not all the tasks in the system assigned to a user, since tasks can be delayed or arranged in order of completion.

Project Planning and Tracking

Planning activities several months ahead is possible since tasks can be arranged in sequences and have other dependencies. This eliminates the need for creating Gantt Charts that, instead of being very hard to keep up-to-date, are simply generated from the hierarchy of tasks and the work schedule of each user.

Workflow/Process Management

Templates may be created for common workflows. Anyone in the team are encouraged to create their own templates. Assigning tasks to roles instead of directly to a user makes the workflows reusable.

A template can define a simple task to a very complex structure with hundreds of activities performing tasks like sending customized emails, starting external applications or inserting data into databases.

Scheduling Events

Tasks can be scheduled to repeat, be delivered or change status based on conditions. A task can, for example, be repeated weekly at a specified time. Project Engine will not only repeat single tasks but also entire structures of tasks and subtasks.

Managing Requirements and Risks

One of the many areas of applications are to use Project Engine to manage requirements and risks. Requirements could have sub requirements and risks could have mitigations to risks as subtasks. A template for risks is provided with Project Engine.

Tracking Defects and Change Requests

Change Requests and Defects are very common workflows in the IT industry. There are mainly two ways of implementing these workflows:

A traditional version where the status of, for example a defect, is changed to move the task further to the next step.

The second version creates a task for each activity to perform, like "Plan", "Correct", "Test", and gives a better overview of the workflow.

Both versions are provided as templates with Project Engine.

Executing Step-By-Step Test Cases

Templates can be created to hold step-by-step instructions or test cases. When the template is activated all steps will be assigned to the user designated to perform the test.

Instant Messaging

To improve the communication even further, Project Engine contains its own instant messaging/discussion client. Send an instant message to any number of users, roles or groups. A discussion can be continued by any user at any time. All discussions are stored in the Old Messages list.

Supporting ITIL Processes

Project Engine is the ideal tool for supporting ITIL processes. The system can drive anything from simple defect- or change-processes to complex workflows supporting an enterprise organization.

Version Control with Traceability to Tasks

The built-in Subversion client takes version control to the people. Version control is no longer a complicated and time consuming task. The Project Engine version control interface requires no training and adds virtually no overhead to the workload of the team.

The dream of traceability between tasks/activities and files is now a reality since all changes to files in the repository will be linked to tasks in Project Engine.