Issue Management: Applying Item Manager to a project

The Hopp Item Manager is completely configurable. For this article, it has been configured to support the processes outlined in the Hopp Migration Methodology Overview article. This section examines the configuration and discusses the choices made. Further details of how to configure the Item Manager are provided in the following pages:

• Item Manager Setup
• Changing the configuration of an Item Type
• Changing the list of values of a field
• Changing settings from a Portal to a Project level

Four types of Item are being used in this configuration:

• Issues
• Tasks
• Milestones
• Releases

Issues and Tasks are used to record details of the issues identified and to manage their resolution. Issues are the main type of Item used for this. Tasks are used to manage elements of the resolution of a complex Issue, which requires more than one person assigned to it.

Milestones and Releases are used to link issue management to wider project management. Key project dates, such as the end of each round of User Acceptance Testing and the planned go-live date, are recorded as Milestones. The detailed plan for the data migration workstream is recorded as a series of Releases.

Issue Management Items

Two types of Items are required to support issue recording in our methodology. The first of these and the main one used is the Issue:

The fields used by the Issue Item include:

Status – only four of the five default values are being used for this field:

Priority – this also uses four of the five default values:

Scope – this is retained as an optional field, giving an additional free-text field that can be used.

Impact – this field is used to record the Business Priority for the issue. It is one of two fields used to determine the overall priority of the issue and modifies the default values as follows:

Date From and Date To are used to record the start and end dates for the issue.

Technical Priority – this field is used to record the Technical Priority for the issue. It is the second of two fields used to determine the overall priority of the issue and modifies the default values as follows:

The second type of Item used to support issue recording is the Task. This type of Item is used for recording optional sub-tasks for Issues.

The fields used by the Task Item include:

Status – this shares the same configuration as the Issue:

Scope – as with the Issue, this is retained as an additional, optional free-text field.

Effort – this optional field can be used to record the estimated amount of time the task will take. The default unit types have been retained:

Date From and Date To are used to record the start and end dates for the task.

Project Management Items

Two more types of Items are required to support the recording of the data migration plan that has been specified in the data migration strategy. The first of these is the Milestone:

Milestones are used to record the main stages of the wider project, which the migration plan needs to align with. They use the following fields:

Status – this shares the same configuration as the Issue and Task Items:

Scope – as with the Issue and Task Items, this is retained as an additional, optional free-text field.

Date From – this is used to record the date of the Milestone.

The second type of planning Item is the Release. This is the main unit of organisation used in the data migration plan and in many respects is analogous to an Agile Sprint:

Releases are used to schedule the work of the data migration workstream and use the following fields:

Status – this shares the same configuration as the other Items:

Scope – as with the other Items, this is retained as an additional, optional free-text field.

Date From and Date To are used to record the start and end dates for the Release.

Initial Hopp Project Preparation

Among the first Items that can be recorded during migration preparation will be the Project Milestones.

These can be taken from the outline project plan and if necessary, can be easily updated when the project plan is finalised. The first Milestone Status can be updated to ‘Active’ when the project moves from initiation to implementation. 

When the migration plan has been defined in the data migration strategy, the Release Items can be added.

The specific aspects of the required mapping can be described in more detail in the ‘Description’ field.

The Status of the first Release can be updated to ‘Active’.

The Project Dashboard configuration can also be updated to include the Items and Timeline widgets, if these are not part of the default Dashboard configuration. This is explained in detail in Dashboard Configuration.

• The Items widget displays a list of all Items in descending order.
• The Timeline widget provides a timeline view of all Items that include the ‘Date From’ and/or ‘Date To’ fields, and users can filter it by Item Type. 

Clicking on the widget title also directly opens the State Items screen or State Timeline screen, respectively.