ALM: User Guide

Before you start managing tasks, teams, and projects, decide on the structure, the scheme, and the objects of management.

There are many approaches to managing projects and activities. You need to understand how ALM will support your management style.

Restricting user access to projects is provided by the module of the same name. If you have a license for this module, a user must first be added to a project before they can see the project data. This can be done in the project settings (Settings — Participants), or from the administrative section, using actions on rows in the user list.

Inside a project, access to entities, their attributes, modules, and reports is based on the roles assigned to the participant. One participant can have several roles. Roles can be created in the project settings. Specific access rights are configured for each role.

To add users to a project in bulk, use the "Users" filter in the "Participants" module. Show the users who are not participants, and use the context menu to give them the roles they need.

A project is a team activity aimed at a specific result. When the result (the project goals) is reached, the project is considered complete. Some kinds of activity are not projects, for example user support or product maintenance. We call these kinds of activity "Activities".

In ALM you can manage both projects and activities using built-in processes or your own. Each project or activity is characterized by:

• a goal, for the sake of which the project was started, or by a set of incoming requirements from users, and so on;
• a team, that is, every project has a set of participants who have access to the project and its artifacts;
• a process, by which the project is managed;
• results (or project artifacts), which are produced by the work of the project team.

Projects let you isolate teams (or project artifacts). Sometimes, though, you need to see the data of all projects, or of some subset of projects. Adding managers to every project is inconvenient. Programs and portfolios can be used for this: they combine data from different projects on one screen.

The project structure is formed from the work of the organization or the project teams, from the management approaches (processes), and from how access is restricted to the project artifacts contained in projects and activities.

You can order projects in the navigation structure with the Number attribute, which can be edited in the Administrative section, under Projects — List.

When we talk about managing something, we picture goals, the chains of work or the task tree related to them, and completing that work on time so that we reach the result we need. In traditional project management this is called a work breakdown structure (WBS).