Overview TimeVu 3.4

TimeVu Project Centre (or TimeVu for short) is a Windows Application designed to bring to project teams information needed to run projects as smoothly as possible. TimeVu is used as a meta-store for project information, taking advantage of Microsoft Office products to help keep project information at the fingertips of all project members. As a client application, TimeVu is an application that runs on each person computer, connected to a database shared by all, e.g.;

At the centre of TimeVu is the project overview, allowing you to see where you are with your project.
From the project overview you can jump to other areas of TimeVu to edit, modify, and delete information .
Other types of information that you can store are directly related to project activities and include;

Timesheets;
Comments;
Change Requests;
Customer contacts;
Documentation information;
Links to other data sources;
Expenses;
Invoices;

All this data is saved within project areas - giving you the ability to report, search, and analyse within and across projects. Creating projects is a job done by the project manger and is done in a separate application (TimeVu Manager), which provides functions such as high level reporting, import / export with other applications such as Microsoft Project, graphs, and analysis.

TimeVu Project Centre Application

At the centre of the TimeVu application is the TimeVu project workspace. This view gives you an overview of the day-to-day tasks each of us needs to do for a project e.g.;

The workspace lets you see;

Scheduled work
To-Do items
Change Requests
Estimated Project hours
Actual Project hours
Your hourly totals

You can jump directly from this view into the data by pressing the "View" link. In the project regions of the application either "My Projects" or "All Projects" you can navigate through the tabs to view the following; 1. The overview which gives the current status of each project;

The view gives an overview of your project and how its going.

2. You can view project summary information:

3. You can view project team information - finding out how each team member is doing:

Note: the sum of the actual and estimated hours is shown on the bottom of the windows form.

4. You can view all the orders that you have received for this project along with the order details and progress:

Note: the sum of the orders value is shown at the bottom of the windows form.

5.You can view all the tasks that the project has, and how much work is being done on each e.g.;

Note: the sum of the hours worked is shown at the bottom of the windows form.

6. You can add comments - storing information about the project;

7. You can add expenses - additional costs for the project;

Note: the sum of the expenses is shown at the bottom of the window form.

8. You can add change requests - keeping track of changes that are made

Note: the change request form can be filtered using selection box at the top of the screen and the right-hand mouse menu. The number of items shown and the total number of items (along with the filter) is shown at the bottom of the page.

The right-hand menu gives you many more options of manipulating the timesheet records as well as filters, grouping, and sending these records to Excel.

9. You can view and edit timesheet records:

Note: the timesheets can be filtered using selection box at the top of the screen and the right-hand mouse menu. The number of items shown along with the value of those items and the total number of items (along with the filter) is shown at the bottom of the page. Also, the right-hand menu gives you many more options of manipulating the timesheet records as well as filters, grouping, and sending these records to Excel.

10.You can also keep control of where, across multiple repositories, information is being kept on this project - you find this under the "Locations" Tab

You can jump to these links directly by double-clicking or clicking "Open" on the right-hand menu. Anyone can add personal locations only seen by themselves (check out the "For" heading either named or for all!) - but if you want to see where others are stashing information - click "Show All Links" and view the other team members links.

Other screens in TimeVu are to do with the day to day running of projects - these screens include;

Time accounting - Timesheets and Auto Timer
Reviewing your timesheets - Review
Contacts
Employees

There is also screens to help you find and output information

Quick Search
Search Locations (file search only)

There is a properties menu that allows you to set properties in TimeVu

All of these data screens are resident on the Task Bar menu that sits in the task bar when TimeVu is running;

So that it can be easily found. By Right-clicking on this icon you can bring up the Task Bar Menu.

Task Bar Menu

An Administration menu [only viewable by the administrator] allows setting information such as:

Administration Menu

Timesheets

The timesheet entry screen in TimeVu is a graphical entry screen;

The timesheet entry screen in TimeVu has been written to make the entry of timesheets as easily as possible and eliminate errors such as double time entry and day length errors. By filling out a timesheet grid its obvious by view what has been the days activities and whether any parts have been missed or confused. The main window allows a user to mark up their days activity graphically, from a palette of their active projects. The information is stored in a central database along with other users timesheets. There are many different ways to create a timesheet entry such as;

Cut and paste.
Copy and paste.
Double clicking on the grid.
Clicking on the toolbar menu.
Dragging the mouse over the grid.
Full keyboard entry.
Scheduling.

Auto-logging timesheet entries

You can create timesheet entries by auto-logging. TheAuto Timing option from the task menu allows you to automatically log time to a selected project. While in this mode the timesheet dialog is set to read only, and you will not be able to change the data on your timesheet.

After selecting Auto Timing , you will need to choose a project using the selection dialog

You can also assign directly to a task, you choose;

Properties in the property dialog can be set to change the way the auto-logging works for you.

Projects

The Project palette shows the projects that the current user is allowed to book time to. The active project is the one with the dark border (IntranetApp project in this case). The active project is the one that you create new timesheet entries for on the grid. Change the active selection by using the mouse to click on the box or project name

As you move your mouse across the names they are highlighted. Double clicking any project name or coloured box will bring up the project information centre- the tabbed dialog discussed above.

Reviewing Timesheet Entries

You can review your own or other peoples timesheet entries by selecting the "Review" Tab in the "My Stuff" area

Review Timesheets

The timesheets tab shows the timesheets associated with the time span selected in the "Start"/"Stop' selection Note. From the timesheet tab you can send the data to excel.

Comments and Change Requests

Each project can have information recorded about it - in this case in the form of comments and change requests.

You can view these data within a form that lists each type with respect to the project e.g.;

Comments Form. Comments arranged grouped by Customer.
The Right-hand mouse menu gives you options to interact with the comment data.

Comments let you store day to day information about how the project is going, tasks that need to be done (to-do), FAQs, Info, Bad, Good, etc.
To-do comments have a special place as these can be viewed as To-do Items in the project Workspace. They can also be set to "Done". A comment can associate with at Task so you can link these items.

You can also save comments next to companies/contacts. These can be viewed either from the Contact dialog information screen, or from the comments dialog by changing the "Type" to "Company".

Adding/Editing the data brings up a dialog box to let you enter/change the data

When you have assigned comments to either a project or a company, you can step through them by double clicking a comment. This brings a comment viewing dialog. The << and >> buttons let you step through the comments without having to close down the dialog

Change Requests. Change requests arranged grouped by Reference.
The Right-hand mouse menu gives you options to interact with the change request data.

Change requests let you assign work items to others in the project group.

Each change request has in authority and team members.
You can assign multiple items to a single Change Requests, with each item having further details being entered.
Timesheet entries can be assigned to Change Requests so you can follow up on the work required for a request.
Email notifications can be sent (see property settings) so that team member can see which change requests they are requested to undertake.
A File can be associated with a change request via a file reference.
You can step through the list of change requests using the << >> buttons

Adding/Editing the data brings up a dialog box to let you enter/change the data

Contacts

The contact dialog lets you enter business contacts/customers.

Drilling down into the customer information lets you view/add/edit more detailed information such as people, comments, business types, links, and timesheets

Business types associates a grouping to the customer. This grouping allows you to find contacts easier, e.g. the tree view can be arranged to be grouped in this manner:

In Contact order:

Searching

There are three methods of searching within TimeVu - you can Quick Search information within TimeVu data. Secondly you can create a more complicated query through the Search dialogs. And thirdly you can use the Project Info Search to search external data relevant to the project.

1. Quick Search

The quick search is a fast an easy way to find data. Quick-Search can be found on the task bar menu and on the menu bar of the dialogs. Its also on the timesheet dialog toolbar. Clicking the Quick-Search button/menu item brings open a quick search dialog. Just select the data you want to search across, type in the search term, press Enter, or the Search button. You will get up a number of forms with results from each of the repositories, timesheets, contact, comments, or change requests.

For the example above, searching all the data for the search term "Test", gave me results on in Change Requests, and Timesheets.

You can then double click on these entries to bring up the dialog which these entries are editable in.

2. Project Info Search

he search lets you query across files within the directory locations

Microsoft Office interaction

TimeVu features tight integration (usually COM automation) with several Office products as follows:

1.Microsoft Project (98,2000,2002,2003 versions)

Project can be set up for import and export with TimeVu. During import the project, task, and resource allocations are brought into TimeVu such that time can be booked by staff against those tasks. During export the progress percentages (actuals / estimated) are pushed back into the original Microsoft Project file which now shows progress bars on appropriate tasks. A good white paper on how TimeVu integrates with Microsoft Project (and the benefits of this) is here:How To Integrate WithMicrosoft Project.pdf

2.Microsoft Excel

Both TimeVu Client and TimeVu Manager provide reporting in Excel. These reports include personal timesheets, project analyses, scheduling etc This is our preferred method since the user often wants to manipulate the information further.

3. Microsoft Word

TimeVu outputs a small number of textual reports in Word. We are currently looking at some mail merge options with user configurable Word templates.