Before you begin adding projects to the Project Planning tool, there are important setup details to complete, and factors to consider.
Employees
Add employees - All employees listed in the Project Planning tool's Resources pane are created and managed in the Project Assignments view. Note: Employees cannot be added to the system using the Project Planning tool.
Review the employee's work days per week and hours per day settings using the Project Planning tool's Working Time tab. These settings are used to determine how much available time each employee has to work on projects.
Use the Project Planning tool's Vacation tab to establish planned time off for the employees. These can be vacation days unique to each employee or common days off for all employees such as bank holidays. The Project Planning tool will schedule projects around these days off.
If you are tracking or budgeting costs, then each employee should have an assigned Pay rate (Rate of wages) and Billing rate (Rate charged). These are set via the employee properties.
Review/set the employee's Admin% using the Project Planning tool's Working Time tab. The Admin% is the percentage of time allocated per day to non-project or administrative work typically not represented in Project Planning tool projects. In establishing the Admin% value, any active projects created in the Project Assignments view should be considered. The more of these active projects that exist, the higher the Admin% should be. The remaining percentage (100% - Admin%) is used as available time for scheduling work in Project Planning tool projects. If you plan to convert some of your existing Project Assignments view projects into Project Planning tool projects, then these can be ignored when determining the Admin% value.
Projects
At this point, we assume you have decided that the new project should be built using the Project Planning tool as opposed to the Project Assignments view. If unsure, then go to Overview - Projects and Assignments.
If you have upgraded from Dovico Timesheet, you can leave your existing projects in the Project Assignments view until their conclusion or you can import some or all of these projects into the Project Planning tool. Any Project Assignments view projects that are administrative in nature, and that don't have established estimated hours should remain Project Assignments view projects. It's important to determine which of these existing and active projects will be imported into the Project Planning tool before you begin creating new projects since this will have an impact on Employee settings - described below.
Importing existing projects
If you have chosen to import and convert existing Project Assignment view projects into the Project Planning tool, then this should be done before you create a new Project Planning tool project. This is particularly important when projects are occurring at the same time. Before importing and converting multiple and concurrent Project Assignment view projects, you must determine the following:
How many projects are being imported?
Determine what percentage of an employee's time is allocated to each imported project.
Determine what percentage of an employee's available time should be kept for new Project Planning tool projects.
Import one project at time, level and publish.
Details on these steps are located in the Adding Multiple Concurrent projects topic.