Project Dashboard

The Project Dashboard allows you to track the breakdown of Project hours by Task and Task Group (or "Phase"). In addition to reviewing hours spent on various project tasks, you can compare planned vs actual start and finish dates, as well as planned vs actual hours or days worked.

To configure your dashboard click the "Edit" button and add the appropriate tasks (and phases) to the dashboard. You can click the Refresh link to automatically build this list, too. The Refresh link will add any tasks that have newly added hours, as well as update the actual hours for all of tasks in the dashboard. The system will also automatically update the actual hours for dashboard items every night - if you need to update the dashboard immediately you can click the Refresh link, too.

You can configure the planned start dates and planned work for each task in the dashboard by clicking the Edit button, or by clicking the task name link in each row of the dashboard and entering the appropriate values. Once you configure the planned values you will see percentage complete and other statistics in the dashboard.

Note: Dashboard statistics such as Percent Complete are updated nightly. Clicking the "Refresh" link will update the statistics immediately.

The following project dashboard columns can be displayed:

Column	Description
Position	The position of each task in the list, starting from 1.
Task Group	The Task Group or Phase level of the work-breakdown-structure (WBS), if enabled. Note that Task Group can be renamed when configuring the WBS on the System > General page.
Task	The Task level of the work-breakdown-structure (WBS), if enabled. Note that Task can be renamed when configuring the WBS on the System > General page.
Status	The task status, such as "In Progress", etc. This list can be configured by clicking the Edit button on any project dashboard, then clicking the "Options" link in the lower-right corner.
Planned Start Date	The planned or estimated start date for the phase or task.
Planned Finish Date	The planned or estimated finish date for the phase or task.
Planned Work	The planned or estimated work for the phase or task, in hours or days. You can specify whether the units are hours or days from the Project Options page.
Actual Start Date	The actual start date for the phase or task.
Actual Finish Date	The actual finish date for the phase or task.
Actual Work	The actual start work recorded for the phase or task. This value is updated automatically by the system every night (or you can update it immediately from the dashboard by clicking the Refresh link).
Percent Complete	This value is computed by the system. If planned work is specified and non-zero then the percent complete will be: 100 * (actual work) / (planned work)
Notes	User-entered notes for this task entry in the dashboard.

To configure which of these columns are displayed click the Options link on the Edit Dashboard page to view the Project Dashboard Options page.

Project Dashboard Options

When editing the project dashboard, you can click the Options link in the lower right corner to go to the Project Dashboard Options page. This page lets you configure global project dashboard settings, such as the list of task states, etc.

Note: Project dashboard options are global settings that will affect all users. Only administrators will have access to the Project Dashboard Options page.

The following dashboard options can be configured:

Property	Description
List Columns	Choose which columns to display in the dashboard. You can specify the order of the columns by dragging and dropping the column names.
Task States	This setting lets you control the list of task states, such as "In Progress", "Completed", etc. as suits your organizational needs. Task states are used on the Project Dashboard to track the status of the tasks needed to complete a project.

Importing/Exporting Dashboards

You can use the tools menu on the project dashboard to import or export the dashboard configuration. See the Project Dashboard CSV Format topic for more information.

Refreshing Dashboards

You can use the tools menu to 'refresh' the actual hours recorded against each project dashboard item. The system automatically updates these values nightly, but you can use the tools menu refresh option to get the most recent value in cases where users are actively entering data.