Activity Reports

Team members can report progress and provide notes regarding status on activities they have been assigned responsibilities for in Activity Schedules.

Click Report>Activity Report, Goal Director will open a dialog box, giving you the option of selecting the year and week to report. The week you are currently in is the default week. (you may also report for others by selecting that person's name under Person in the drop-down menu.)

After you have chosen a year and week for the report, a window will pop up with only the activities that the person is scheduled to work on during the period you have selected. (If the period selected is beyond an activity finish date, the activity will not appear on the report.  To report on those late activities, the activity date must be extended by clicking Tools>Displace activity dates.  (see Extending Activities))

At the far right of the window you may view activity information such as the scheduled finish date and original estimates. You may customize the view by clicking on View>Personal Activity Report and then select options.

Activity report fields

You may report the following progress information for activities in the columns in the left area of the window:

Work Done
Here you may report the total number of hours or days you have worked in the period. If you wish to report on your work accomplished each day of the week instead of for the entire week, you may click View>Personal activity report>Show Weekdays.

Work to do
This is the amount of time, in hours and days, that you estimate will be required to complete the activity.

On schedule
Enter a Y or N according to whether or not you will make the scheduled finish date.

Quality accepted
Enter a Y or N according to whether or not the quality of the work you have done is good enough.

Responsibility Chart kept
Enter a Y or N according to whether or not people worked on the activity according to the responsibility chart.

Changes Required.
Enter a Y or N according to whether or not modifications were necessary on the work you have accomplished.

Waiting time
Enter a Y or N according to whether or not you were required to wait for other people to complete their tasks before you could start or continue your work.

Special problems
Enter a Y or N according to whether or not special problems have arisen. The text field under is available for expanded descriptions.

Delay
Report delays for the activities.

Accumulated
This column shows the sum of prior reported hours, days, weeks or month.

Annotating the report
For example, if you report N for the field On Schedule, Goal Director shows this in a red color.  You may annotate any of the Y or N answers in the following way:

• Click on Add in the lower right area of the window
  
• Give the annotation a description name.
• Type your comments in the fields:  Description, Cause, Consequence, Action.
• Highlight the Y or N field you wish to annotate.
  
• Click on Link to connect the annotation.

Comments can be deleted or given a new name by highlighting the comments and clicking on Delete or Rename.

If you wish to delete a connection you already have created, you can highlight the report field and click on Unlink.
 

Viewing Activity Report options

Sort by
The activities are initially shown and sorted by activity code. You can show  and sort by the full  identity of the activities by clicking View>Personal activity report>Sort by>Project, Milestone Plan, Milestone...

All : Shows all activities you are scheduled to work on, in every time period.

Ongoing: Shows all activities you are working on in the current period.

Ongoing and recently worked on: Shows all activities you are working on in the current period plus the activities you worked on in the previous period (week).

When all team members have created their Activity reports, Project Leaders and others can then create an overall report aggregating those individual activity reports by clicking Report>Aggregate.  It will show the aggregate total work hours, remaining work and all the annotations of problems or issues on specific activities.

Printing, Previewing, Making .GIF files
Throughout Goal Director, you can print reports to either a printer, screen or a  .gif file that can be put into other applications (for example Word, Notes etc.) If you want to send a report to a printer, click the Printer icon in the tool bar. If you want to preview on the screen, click the Print Preview icon in the tool bar. If you want to make a .gif file click on Copy in the Print Preview tool bar to save it to a subdirectory of your choice.

• Activity level
• Milestone level
• Project level

Aggregate reports are run by clicking Report>Aggregate. The dialog box shown below enables you to choose which type of report and which time interval you want to run. You can also update existing reports by checking Regenerate existing reports.

Click on Start to create the aggregate report.

After Goal Director has finished aggregating your report, a dialog box will pop up (see below) telling you if a New report has been saved and for which Milestone.  To view a report, highlight the desired report and click on the button Open Report. The reports are saved under the indicated Milestone in the project tree corresponding to the report's level.

Deleting reports
All reports that have been printed out are kept to maintain a project report history. It is, however, possible to delete reports by right clicking on the report in the project tree and clicking Delete.

Below is an example of an Aggregate Activity Report that shows the aggregated status and annotations reported by all people who submitted activity reports for the various activities for the selected period of time.

Printing the report
You can choose print properties to control: time period, whether to display the Gantt, Codes, Revised dates, Responsibility codes, Estimates, or Both. 

Click Ok to print out..

Extending finish dates for activities of milestone plans or milestones

To report on ongoing activities that are beyond the the planned finish date, you must extend the finish dates.

To extend  the finish dates for all activities belonging to a milestone or all activities belonging to a milestone plan, click Tools>Displace activity dates and select the Milestone plan, or specific Milestones and the number of days to displace.

Status report by Program Managers

• Project Properties
• Budget status
• Progress

This report is generated using data from the Project Leader's  Status Report

To generate this printout you must have created a Project Leader Status report on at least one project, and have one of your projects opened.

Click on Report> Progress report.

In the dialog choose the report period and the project you want the report for. Only projects of the logged on Project Leader are shown.

• Estimates (estimates from Activity Responsibility charts)
• Completed (the work hours that the project team members have reported as completed)
• Deviation (estimates vs. completed hours)
• Remaining (the work that hours the project team members have reported as remaining)
• Prognosis (the sum of hours completed and the reported remaining hours)
• Total (the original estimate minus the prognosis for completion)

The report below can be viewed on the screen by clicking Print preview icon or sent to the printer by clicking on the Print icon in the tool bar.

• Estimates (estimates from Activity Responsible charts)
• Completed (the work hours the project team members have reported as completed)

The report can be viewed on the screen or a sent to a printer by clicking on the appropriate icon in the tool bar.

• Estimates (estimates from Activity Responsible charts)
• Completed, in blue (the work hours that the project team members have reported as completed)
• Prognosis, in green (the sum of hours completed and the reported remaining hours)

The report above can be viewed  on the screen or sent to the printer by clicking on the appropriate icon in the tool bar.

Email Time sheet

You can Email a time sheet to a person who is responsible for entering people's hours into the payroll system. To Email it, click Report>Mail time sheet.

Print Project description

This prints all the following information about the project, selected by year:

• Responsible persons
• Time frame
• Budget
• Mandate
• Milestone plans

To print this report open the project, then highlight the project name and click Report> Project description 
No preview is available for this printout. It is sent directly to the printer.

Administering Resources (Roles, Organizations and Persons)

Roles

The Principle chart and Milestone plan Responsibility charts use Roles (skills, groups) as defined for the organization. Click on Resource>Roles or Ctrl+Shift+R.  A window will pop up with options to Add new roles, Delete or Modify existing roles. You can also add new Roles while you are working with the Principle chart or Milestone Responsibility charts.

Organizations and Units

You may classify roles and persons by Organizations and Units.  Click Resource>Organizations/Units or Ctrl+Shift+O

In the example below, you see that we have set up several organizations. New organizations are set up by clicking on New and entering the name of the organization you want to set up.

You may define Units within Organizations. Highlight the organization, click on New and enter the name of the new unit.

You may also include predefined role(s) in an organization and unit by doing the following:

• Highlight the organization and unit
• Highlight role(s) and click on >> to include those roles
  

Persons

Defining persons in the organization is done by clicking Resource>Persons or Ctrl+Shift+P.

Goal Director will generate a dialog box containing persons who have already been defined (eg. Supervisor).  Those persons with full login privileges are shown in boldface type. To add a new employee, click on Add.

When adding a new employee, the following information should be filled in:

• Name : First and last names
  
• Initials : Unique combination of letters, usually First letter of the first and last names
• E-mail : The person's e-mail address
• User name : If using Windows NT, the user name can be the same as the one for logging-on to the machine
• Password : The password that the person will need to supply during log-on.
• User group : User level access control as defined on the server
• Organization : The organizational entity the person belongs to (selected from drop-down list)
• Unit : The unit entity the person belongs to (selected from drop-down list)
• Roles : The role(s) the person has, or belongs to

All information entered for the person can be modified or deleted at any time by highlighting the person in the initial pop-up dialog and clicking Modify or Delete.

When you are finished updating persons, click Close.

Project Classification Criteria

• Business area
• Project Program
• Project Status
• Project Type
• Evaluation Status
• Progress Evaluation

Project portfolio

The project portfolio is an overview of the selected projects time frame(start- and finish date) in a Gantt format. The deviation between the finish date and revised date is printed in red. To open the project portfolio,  click Report>Portfolio reports>Project portfolio

• 4  chars in year = all date formats in the application will display the year as 4 numbers (YYYY).
• Small font in printout = all printouts will have an 8 pt. font.
• Preview in Landscape = all previews will show up in the Landscape format.
• Preview in A3 = all previews will be shown in A3 format.
• Show the organization-abbreviation as a person-prefix = you will be able to search for persons within organizations
• Auto resize the width of the task codes table = all responsibility charts will automatically adjust the size of the frame for roles/persons.
• Default timescale = Set the estimating unit as the default throughout Goal Director.
• Default gantt scale = Set the gantt scale as the default throughout Goal Director.

Under the E-mail tab, you have the following choices:

• E-mail Address = your own standard e-mail address. Must be added under resource menu.
• SMTP Server Host = the name of your email server 
• Port = the port you use for mail
• Time sheets = the initial e-mail address you want Goal Director to display  when you want to email your time sheets.
• Activities = the initial e-mail address you want Goal Director to display when you want to email all project activities.

Under the Server tab, you have the following choices:

• Server Host name = Enter the Goal Director server's computer name (as recognized by the network) or its IP address.
• Server Port Number = You can specify which port Goal Director will use when being run as an application applet.  The default is 1099.