From Achievo/ATK Wiki

Contents 1 Guided Tour 2 Profiles, Employees, Activities, Roles and Scheduletypes 2.1 Profiles and employees 2.2 Activities, roles and scheduletypes 2.3 Organizations, Projects and Phases 2.4 Organizations 2.5 Projects and phases 3 Time registration 3.1 Adding an entry 3.2 The Day View 3.3 The Week View 3.4 Now what? 4 Project and Phase templates 4.1 Why templates? 4.2 Phase templates 4.3 Project templates 5 Reporting 5.1 The Time Survey 5.2 The Employee Week Report 5.3 Employee Statistics 5.4 Project Statistics 5.5 Project Planning 6 Conclusion

Guided Tour

This tour of Achievo will help you to setup the system after it has just been installed. We will show you the relevant parts of the system where you need to define some data before the end-users can start their use of Achievo.

The tour works best if you have a working, fresh Achievo installation by hand to try out everything described here.

Profiles, Employees, Activities, Roles and Scheduletypes

Profiles and employees

The first thing to do after setting up Achievo is to create at least one profile and one user. It is not a good idea to use the default 'administrator' user in Achievo. It is intended for initial setup, but you should start using a regular user account as soon as possible.

The first place to look is in the 'Employees' menu. You'll find an option 'Security Profiles' there. When you click it, the right part of the screen changes to the profile management screen. A profile is a set of privileges that you can assign to users.

The profile screen is divided into two parts. The top part can be used to create a new profile. The bottom part displays existing profiles and lets you search them. (Later on you'll recognize this structure in most of Achievo's features.)

On first use, no profiles will yet be available. A useful first profile is one with all access rights. Enter something along the lines of 'Managers' as name for the first profile, and click the 'Save' button. You'll now be taken to a second screen that allows you to specify in details what managers may do in Achievo. It's too early to explain all the options in detail, so for the sake of brevity, and because we want to walk through all features, let's assume Managers may do anything they like. By clicking the 'Select All' link, you enable all checkboxes at once. Near the bottom of the screen, you can click the 'save and close' button to save the profile and go back to the profile main window.

Ok, so we now have a security profile. Later on, you'll want to create some more. Useful profiles are profiles for 'Projectleaders', 'Controllers', 'Programmers', etc, but for the sake of the Tour, one profile is enough.

It's now time to create a user account. The option 'Employees' in the menu on the left takes you to the employee admin screen. The 'Employee Add' link opens a screen to enter the employee data. The important parts are:

• the user-id, which is used to login to Achievo,
• the real name,
• profile
• password

For profile, you should select the just created 'Managers' profile. Some parts of Achievo can send mail to users, so entering a valid email address is a good thing to do.

It is not obligatory, but it is useful to add a contract for the user. In the contract, you can configure on which days the user works, and how many hours a week. There are several features in Achievo that make use of this information (for example for calculating overtime)

After you saved the user, logout of Achievo, and re-login with the user-id and password of the user you just created.

Activities, roles and scheduletypes

After you logged in with the new user account, have a look at the Setup menu on the left. It contains the following items:

• Activities, for configuring the activities on which you want to track time.
• Phase templates, which are templates for phase configurations, we'll get to this later on.
• Project templates, which are templates for project configurations, we'll handle this together with the phase templates later on.
• Roles. Here you can configure the roles that people can have when taking part in a project.
• Organization contracts. If you have contracts with your customers (for example hosting contracts), here is where you can define the types.
• Schedule types. Appointments can be categorized; here you can configure the categories that you will use.

Let's focus on some of these items now (we'll get to the other ones soon).

Activities

One of Achievo's main features is time registration. When you want to keep track of how much time is spent on which projects, you can also indicate on what activity it was spent. If you don't care about such details, one 'General' activity might suffice, but it's a good idea to distinguish between several activities.

For each activity, you can enable the 'Specification required' option. If you do not enable this, users can register time on the activity without specifying a remark. When you enable the option, users are required to specify a remark with details about what they did. For example, for the 'Testing' activity, people would have to specify what they tested, and especially for activities like 'Other', it is a useful means of figuring out what people actually did.

Roles

Later on you will be creating projects. For each project, you can define a project team. A team consists of employees and/or contact persons from other organizations. To keep track of which team member has which function, you must indicate a role for each member. In the Roles menu item in the setup menu, you can configure what roles you will be using. For employees, useful roles are 'Developer', 'Tester', 'Project leader', etc. For external contact persons, you might add roles like 'Customer', 'Financial controller', 'Supplier', etc. You define one set of roles. You can use all roles both for employees and external contacts.

This way, you can not only track projects done completely by your own staff, but also projects that are done in cooperation with external companies.

Schedule types

When creating appointments, you can specify a category. In this menu item, you can configure what categories the users will be able to use. Useful categories might be 'External meeting', 'Holiday', 'Private appointment', 'Internal meeting', etc. If you do not want to categorize, create at least one category like 'General'.

For each category that you add, you can select a foreground and background colour. This is the colour that will be used to display the appointment in the scheduler. If you don't have too many categories, users will get used to the colour schemes and recognize appointments without having to look at the details.

Organizations, Projects and Phases

Organizations

After you've set up the initial things, like activities, etc, it is time to enter some business data.

In the organization menu, you can add your business relations. The menu is called 'Organizations' instead of 'Customers', because probably you not only have customers, but also suppliers, partners, etc. You can enter all of them in the organization menu.

To add an organization, enter it's name in the appropriate box and click the 'Save' button. You'll now see a second screen where you can enter all details of the organization.

You can also add contact persons to the organization. Add all persons of the organization you'll be doing business with. These might include for example the general manager, their account manager, a project leader, sales people, etc. Also, if you're entering a partner with whom you will do a project together, add the people that will work on the project.

For the tour, entering an organization or two, each with some contact persons, will suffice.

Projects and phases

After you added some organizations, go back to the main menu and enter the project menu.

The project administration screen will be opened by default, and you'll be able to enter the first project. Enter its name, and if you like, an abbreviation. The abbreviation is a kind of short identifier for the project in order to quickly recognize it in reports, or a short name to search for when you are looking for the project. An abbreviation is not required but it may be useful later on.

There's also a field named template, but we'll get to that later. For now, you can leave it to the default setting.

After you entered the name, and optionally, an abbreviation, click the save button. A second screen will now appear, allowing you to enter all project details.

There is so much to tell about a project, that it has been split into several tabs. I'll walk you through all of them here.

General On this tab, you can find some general project information. The following fields are available:

• Name: The name of the project.
• Abbreviation: Short representation of the name (useful for searches and quick lookups).
• Coordinator: The person in your organization who is responsible for managing the project internally.
• Description: An optional multi-line description of the project
• Fixed price: If the project is done for a fixed price, you can enter the price here. This is used by add-on modules such as the billing module.
• Status: The status of a project. Active projects are projects currently in use. Non-active projects are projects no longer in use. Archived projects are hidden completely in the system. It's like a delete, but you can keep the project in case you need it in the future.
• Contactpersons: Here you can add all external persons that are part of the project team. You can add the person at the customer site who serves as your contactperson, and you can also add contactpersons from suppliers, partners, etc. For each contact person you add, you can select a role you created earlier.

Planning On the Planning tab, you can find information related to the planning of the project:

• Employees: Here you add all employees who are part of the project. For each employee you add, you can select one of the roles you created earlier. (Note: time registration is currently not limited to people on the project team, but other modules make use of the information about the project team, and future versions will be able to limit access to the project to just the team members).
• Startdate and enddate: The startdate and estimated enddate of the project.
• Phases: Here you add the phases that make up the project. Usually, you'll want to create phases like 'Preparation phase', 'Design phase', 'Development phase', 'Test phase', 'Support phase', etc. But this, of course, is up to you, and depends on the type of business you are in. Even if you don't want to use phases, you should create at least one phase ('Main', for example), because it is needed to be able to register time.
  For each phase, you can specify estimated duration and which activities people may register time on during the phase. This way, you can specify that people may not do design in the development phase, and no development in the design phase. This information is used by the project planning gantt chart, among others.
• Phase dependencies: if you have 2 phases or more, you can indicate dependencies. For example, the development phase may not start until the design phase has been completed, etc.

Todo's Here you can add todo's for the project. These are not like 'tasks' in which a project is divided. They are just simple reminders of things people need to do. Like "mail this or that to the customer" or "don't forget to review the design spec.". Achievo will send reminders of todo's that are due, and you can keep track of their status. (In a future version, todo's might get a bigger role and might be promoted to actual tasks or sub-phases).

Notes The notes tab can be used to write stuff down, e.g., like the familiar yellow post-it notes.

After you created a project with at least one phase with one or more activities, you are ready to register time.

Time registration

Everything you need to register time has been set up in the previous chapters. Now it is time to tour one of Achievo's core features.

If you haven't done so already, go back to the main menu, and select 'Time Registration'. The registration screen will open up on the right.

It is divided in 2 parts: The top area is for adding new entries. The bottom area displays entries already entered. By default, it shows all entries of today. This is called the dayview.

Adding an entry

The time entry screen contains several fields:

• Date: Here you select the date for which you want to register time. Usually, you want to register time for the day already selected. If you want to register time for a different day, you can select a different one, but it is more convenient to navigate to the day you wish with the day or week view.
  If you need to register time for multiple days at once, you can use the 'Select range' link, which adds an end-date to the screen.
  When using multiple days, you can indicate on which days the time should be registered. This is useful when you want to register a four week holiday, but not on saturdays and sundays.
  For 99% of the time entries however, you'll just want to use the current date.
• Project/phase: Here you select the project and the phase on which you worked. The dropdown contains the 10 most recently used projects/phases, and is initially empty. You can use the 'Search in all projects & phases' link to select a project that is not in the dropdown. You can only register time on active phases of active projects. If a project has only one phase, the phase is selected automatically.
• Activity: With this dropdown, you can select which activity you worked on. All activities of the selected phase are displayed in the dropdown.
• Remark: Here you can specify in detail what you worked on. For some activities, a remark may be optional. For others it may be required, depending on the setting of 'Specification required' which you set earlier for each activity.
• Time: Here you select how long you worked on the activity.

The level of detail in which you want to register time is up to you, and is something you will need to communicate with your employees. For some companies, it might be ok if users register 8 hours on one single activity on a day, with no remark detailing the work done. For others, a more detailed approach is desired. We like to have as much detail in the registrations as possible, in order to be able to indicate to our customers exactly what we did.

What you register and what you don't register is up to you, too. However, we think it works best when users have to register everything they do. This means that if they have a 40 hour contract, they should register 40 hours a week. The reminder scripts provided with Achievo can nag users until they have registered enough hours to fit their contract.

For 'wasted' time, for example for breaks, reading news-sites etc, it is useful to have one General project with activities such as 'Other', 'Holiday', 'Illness'. If people use this project to register their non-productive time, you will be able to monitor the efficiency of your company.

The Day View

The day view near the bottom of the time registration screen shows all time registered on the selected day.

It has navigation links to navigate to adjacent days, and a date picker to jump to a specific date.

The list of entries has a row with the total amount of time registered for the selected date.

For convenience, a link to the scheduler is present. This is useful for situations like 'What did I do yesterday? Oh yeah, I went to a meeting'.

The Week View

In the Day View, there's a link to the Week View. If you click it, the bottom half of the screen will switch to a full week of time entries.

It does not have the level of detail of the day view, but it shows per day per project how many hours are registered.

Also, it gives an indication of the number of hours you registered in the week. The columns representing the days of the week have a clickable title, which takes you to the day view of the selected day.

Depending on the configuration of Achievo, the week view also has a 'lock' link. This can be used to indicate that you are done registering time for the selected week. After you lock it, you can no longer change it. This is useful if a financial department needs to process the registered time entries. Depending on configuration and user privileges, users can unlock the week themselves, or else only managers can unlock locked weeks.

Depending on the setting of $config_timereg_incompleteweeklock, users may always lock the week (when it's set to true), or only if they registered the number of hours that matches their contract (when it's set to false).

Now what?

Now you know everything you need to know in order to use one of the basic features of Achievo. There are however, a set of helpful features available to make your life easier. They may be a bit hard to find, so we devoted a separate chapter to them.

Project and Phase templates

Why templates?

Once you've created several projects, you'll notice similarities between them.

Probably, most of them consist of the same phases, and also probably, most of those phases always have the same set of activities.

Or perhaps you have large and small projects. Each with their own characteristic sets of phases and activities.

When you have to create a lot of projects that all look alike, this becomes a very tedious job.

Enter templates.

In the Setup menu, you can create Project and Phase templates.

Phase templates

Let's deal with the phases first.

If you have recurring phases, like a 'Design phase' that always looks the same (same set of activities), you can create a phase template for the phase.

In the Setup menu, there's an entry named 'Phase templates', where you can add templates for phases. If you add several template phases, you'll have a nice list to choose from when adding phases to a project.

The fields you can enter for the template are similar to that of a real phase, so I won't explain them in detail here.

Keep in mind that a template is used only when creating a new phase. A copy of the template is made, and after that, the new phase has it's own life. You can change the phase as much as you like, and this will not influence the template. Likewise, if you change the template, for exmaple by adding a new activity, this will only affect phases created after the change. All existing phases that were once created from the template are unaffected.

Project templates

A project templates is one step further than a phase template. If not only phases look alike, but also entire projects seem to have the same phase structure, it is useful to create project templates.

Once you have a good set of project templates, creating new projects becomes extremely easy. You'll also find that working in a structured way, by structuring all your projects in the same way, will organize the way people work.

Like phase templates, project templates are only used when creating a new project. After creation, they both have their own life, and changes in the template will not affect existing projects and vice versa.

Reporting

Registering time is only useful if you can retrieve the information from the system. There are several reporting possibilities in Achievo, some of which I will show you here.

The Time Survey

The most practical way to retrieve registered time entries is through the 'Time Survey' in the 'Reports' menu.

It is divided into two parts. The top part of the screen contains a selection area, which allows you to specify exactly what entries you want to view. You can view per project, per activity, per phase, per employee, per supervisor, per date. Also, you can customize the output of the report.

If you need to print the entries, you can choose a 'printer friendly' version of the report.

The bottom part of the screen shows the entries matching your selection. For your own entries, you can edit or delete the entries from here as well. The report also has a row with totals. This makes it useful to quickly see how many hours are spent on a project, on a certain activity and/or by a certain user.

The Employee Week Report

The other report in the 'Reports' menu is the Employee Week Report. This is a useful report that gives a quick overview of how many hours the employees are reporting each week. You can see if the hours are locked or not, and you can view details per day, or just the summary.

Also, it gives an indication of overtime, by comparing the number of hours worked with the number of hours in the contract for that week.

(Note: if people compensate overtime by registering less time in a different week, this report will not notice that, so be careful when using this report for calculating paychecks).

Like the Hour Survey, the top part of the screen can be used to select which data you want to view.

Employee Statistics

In the Employee menu, there's an item called 'Employee Statistics', which displays simple but useful statistics for an employee. You can see, for a certain time frame, how the time of that employee was distributed over the projects he worked on, and how it was distributed over the activities he did.

It can be a useful guide when determining a person's efficiency.

Project Statistics

In the Projects menu, there's an entry called 'Project Statistics'.

When you open it, it shows the top 10 projects in a certain time frame. You can select a specific timeframe and/or you can choose to see the complete list.

In the list, each project can be clicked. When clicked, detailed statistics for the project are shown in several charts. There's a line diagram which displays the amount of time registrations over time, and there are three pie charts displaying the distribution of registered time over phases, employees and activities. (Note that some of these charts may not work if there is no, or only one, registered time entry.)

Project Planning

Also in the 'Projects' menu, is an item called 'Project Planning'. It contains a graphical gantt chart, representing your project. It takes into account the phases of the project, the dependencies between the phases and the estimated phase lengths.

The bars inside the gantt chart depict actually registered time versus planned time.

Conclusion

You've now seen the most important features of Achievo. You haven't seen all of them, but enough to get you started.

Furthermore, the other features will probably explain themselves, once you get to know Achievo a bit.

Should you have any questions concerning features discussed in this tour, or any of the other features, feel free to contact us. We prefer using the Achievo Forums for such questions. This way, other people can learn from your question and the answer to it.