Intro

Hello and welcome to ProjectPipe 101. My name is Mike Coyle. I am one of the founders of Botonomy, the company behind ProjectPipe. In this video, which runs about 20 minutes, we are going to walk through the key moving parts, and show how the integration that we bring to the table, coupled with our focus on simplicity, will make it easy for you to manage your project team and deliver quickly in an agile and distributed environment. So, without further adieu, let's get started.

Login (0:28)

Now let's login to ProjectPipe. In ProjectPipe, your username is the email address that you used to register. So in this case, we're using a demo account. Type in your password, and then either hit Enter or hit the Login button, and we're in.

Screen Layout (0:47)

The ProjectPipe interface is comprised of three sections:

• The Header section that runs across the top of the screen
• The View list which runs down the left side of the screen
• The Content Area, which makes up the rest of the screen

Process View (1:12)

The process view is our mechanism for providing lightweight process guidance. We believe that good processes pave desirable actions right into the the path of least resistance, so that the right thing to do is also the easy thing to do.

To this end, we set out to make ProjectPipe's guidance:

• Visual
• Simple
• Internally Consistent

In terms of visual support, we provide a graphical metaphor for your project's processes in our Project Lifecycle Pipeline, an interactive browser that allows you to easily navigate the various process groups.

In terms of simplicity, we provide a simple set of recommended artifacts and process recommendations out-of-the-box. Of course, all ProjectPipe content is easily customizable thru the web to meet your organization's standards.

Lastly, we tried to address the issue of consistency across the project lifecycle through what we refer to as the Project Management Trifecta.

We believe that regardless of the vertical industry that you're in, or the problem domain that you're addressing, or even the technology stack that you're employing, you can distill most of what goes on in a project as the set of:

• Documents that need to be written
• Lists of things that need to be managed
• Actions that need to occur. Our notion of actions covers things such as analysis, management, and team collaboration.

We've taken this Document/List/Action trifecta, and swept it across the five PMI-inspired process areas, so that there is little guesswork involved as your project progresses.

So you can see as we navigate across the process areas, the specific document/list/action items change, but their organization and visual context remains consistent.

There's no silver bullet when it comes to methodology. That being said, we've tried to provide the right balance of structure and customizability so that your team can pragmatically leverage ProjectPipe to at least score a solid bronze.

Detail View (3:07)

Next we'll take a look at Detail View. Detail View is the tool that you'll use to take a look at the low-level line item data elements that you have to manage, whether you're talking Use Cases, requirements, Risks, Issues, project plan Tasks, etc.

There are two ways to look at your data when in the Detail View. You can use our outliner, in the outline view, where we provide a reasonably feature-rich outliner. It provides functions such as pagination, which allows you to view your data a page at a time. We support hoisting, so you can look at an isolate a subset of the overall tree and focus in on that. This is very useful if you're dealing with a very large dataset.

We also provide navigation tools so that you can take a node and move it up or down, in or out, relative to its current position in the hierarchy. In terms of creating new nodes (or new line items), you can with a single click:

• Create a sibling, which is a peer in the outline level
• Create a child
• Duplicate an existing node. This is useful if you're creating lots of items that are similar to each other.

ProjectPipe's Detail View also allows you to view your data as a table. When you're in Table View, you can sort by any of the columns in ascending or descending order, just by clicking on the column header. If you decide to go back to the Outline view, it's easy to toggle back and forth.

We believe that the Outline and Table Views provide two very complementary mechanisms for you to manage your data.

Content Templates (4:55)

ProjectPipe provides content templates for many of the data types managed in the Detail View. For example, if you want to add a new Use Case, bring up the Use Cases, click "add new", and then we have a choice of one of many HTML templates. So we pick the Complex Use Case template, and it brings up the integrated WYSIWYG HTML editor, and you can see it provides for bolding, lists, highlights, etc.

All of the content in the templates is customizable. If you go into the Template Detail View, and scroll down to Use Cases, we can look at the Complex Use Case, and go in and edit it. We'll customize the example and save it. Now when we add a new Use Case with that template, we have the custom text coming up.

We don't just allow you to customize existing templates. Rather, we also give you the ability to add new templates. For example, we'll find the Complex Use Case template and duplicate it. We'll call this new template "Demo Use Case", delete some sections to keep it real simple. Now when we go back to the Use Case view, if we want to create a new Use Case, we can now pick a "Demo Use Case" from the list, and we can see that the content reflects our changes.

You can see that we provide a variety of options that allow you to get started quickly and customize your project content as you go along.

Workflow View (7:36)

The workflow view is the place where ProjectPipe maintains its list of operational reports. When you click on the header, it brings up the list, and you can see that we have one report "Open Issues" which is comprised of issues that need to be resolved. To look at how this query is created, we can bring up ProjectPipe's Query Builder. We can do things such as add columns and view the updated query in the context of live data.

You can also add custom queries/reports for either the team or your personal use. In this case, I want to build a private report for Use Cases related to demographic data. I'll say that this query is Private, and add a condition where the name field has "demographic" in it. Hit refresh, and you can see that we have three records. I only really care about the name, description, and Tags. Now I'll save it.

Now this report will show up in my workflow view, but not in any of my team members'. If I click on that, I can see the three Use Cases related to demographics, and see the tags associated with each.

This is a flexible and reasonably powerful mechanism for managing your data in a way that your team sees fit.

Source Code Repository (9:25)

ProjectPipe provides an integrated source code repository, leveraging the Subversion source code management system. Subversion is a very powerful and popular source code management tool. ProjectPipe makes it very easy to get up and running with Subversion. If you click on the Team tab, we have instructions for connecting to the Subversion repository, for both the graphical Windows client and the traditional command line client. In both cases, we have integrated your project configuration into the instructions, so configuration is largely a cut-and-paste operation, and you're up and running.

Integrated Change Management (10:10)

ProjectPipe's source code repository is also integrated with its issue list, which makes it very straightforward to manage the workflow of bug fixes. For example, I have a web page where a user notices a typo. I go into the issue list, and create a new issue describing the typo. You'll see that it shows up as a new issue #9. It also shows up in the Open Issues list, as issue #9. Now, when I make the fix and commit the change in Subversion, I'll comment the commit as saying "fixed issue 9". We can see that the repository has committed the change. If I go back to the issue list, issue #9 shows up as Fixed, and it no longer appears in the Open Issue query in the Workflow View.

ProjectPipe's integration between the source code repository and the issue list makes it very easy to manage the workflow of your bug fixes.

MS Project and Excel Integration (12:00)

Most of ProjectPipe's functionality is web-based, which means that you can run it on Windows, Mac (as I do), Linux, etc. But if you're running on Windows, and you're a user of Microsoft Office (Excel, Project, etc.), we integrate seamlessly.

For example, if you click on the Project tab, and click the "download project plan" link, ProjectPipe will, through our local client that you can install and sits resident in your System Tray, manage the negotiation between your desktop and the server. Now we're build a local copy of the project plan based upon the data on the server. This is running slow because I'm also running the video software capture, but in practice, it runs very fast. [NOTE: THIS RAN SIGNIFICANTLY SLOWER IN THE VIDEO THAN IT DOES IN REAL LIFE]

Now we pop back to the browser, and it tells us that it's complete. Now if we pop over to MS Project, you can see the project plan has been created.

If we pop over to MS Project, you can see that the dummy data that we're using to sketch out the basic project plan doesn't have dates, but the data has all been downloaded.

Now, we'll go the other way. I'll delete all of the existing task data. I'll go back to MS Project and make some changes. We'll then go back to the browser and click "Upload Data". This will upload the data in the local project plan to the server. Now it's updated, so we'll click "done". When we look at the task list, the changes are reflected.

Now, let's say that you need to take your Requirements list and export it to Excel. Click the Spreadsheet link, and ProjectPipe will fire up Excel and download all of your data.

Links and Traceability (15:11)

ProjectPipe makes it very easy to establish links among the data in your project. This is very useful for dependency analysis and traceability.

For example, we're going to take a look at a Requirement that is related to managing demographic data in a medical application. So we click on the Requirement, then click "edit links". At this point, we could set a link between this Requirement and anything else in the project. But in this case we're going to look at Use Cases, and specifically at Use Cases that have something to do with demographics.

Hit search, and you see that there are three of them. Click add, and a dialog pops within the browser. The dialog allows you to set the type of link, so we'll specify that this requirement "Exists because of" the Use Case. We'll add a couple more Use Cases links. You'll see that you can also add a comment to the link relationship.

Now when we go back and look at the requirements list, we can see that this requirement is related to these three Use Cases. If you click on the link, it will take you to the Use Case. If you go back to the Requirement and click "traceability graph" we can visualize the relationship between the Requirement and the three Use Cases that it "exists because of". The graph that is generated is active, so if you click on any node, it will take you to the related item.

This is a very easy mechanism for navigating data if you're unfamiliar with it, as you can easily bounce back and forth between the graphs and the detail items. It is very useful in identifying and exploring non-obvious relationships within your project data.

Tagging (17:22)

As a project manager, it would be great if you could take a step back and say "Show me everything in my project that needs to be wordsmithed", or "Show me all of the Requirements that the development team thinks are hard to implement", or everything that is "ambiguous", or "needs re-estimating".

We have a solution for this. It's called Tagging.

Tags were made very popular by the photo sharing website Flickr.com. They've been used in Google's GMail, and Amazon is also using them. The premise is that you can take a Tag such as "technically challenging" or "ambiguous" and by clicking on the tag it will crosscut across the various data types so that you can group things based upon concept, not just based upon a rich and rigid taxonomy.

You can also create your own tags. For example, Bob is a pretty seasoned guy on the team, and there are a bunch of things that I want Bob to review, and they're all over the place:

• The patient demographic management Use Case
• The data management scalability Issue
• The Web services piece of the sketched out Architecture

Now, when you go to the Tags page, you see that there are three things that I want "Bob to Review", and they crosscut the various buckets that you'd typically store your data in. In a traditional (i.e. non-ProjectPipe) project, you'd have Architecture concepts in source code or in the developers' head, you'd have risks in an Excel spreadsheet, and you'd have Use Cases in a Word doc. In that scenario, it's difficult to get pinpoint accuracy in terms of the specific line items that you want someone to review.

We're pretty happy with this. This approach has been proven out to scale, and it's been very useful for us internally.

Role-Based Security (20:08)

ProjectPipe is built atop a flexible and robust role-based security model. All of the data entities that you see in the Detail View are individually securable. All of the roles in the system as well as the permissions can be easily be configured so that you can tailor ProjectPipe security to the specific needs of your project.

Data Syndication via RSS (20:35)

ProjectPipe provides RSS news feeds for all data under management. Dedicated feed are available for additions, modifications,deletions, or all changes. All news feeds are governed by the policies that you lay out in our Role-based Security model.

Conclusion (21:00)

So this concludes our overview of ProjectPipe. I'd like to thank you for taking the time to watch this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to find out more about ProjectPipe or if you'd like to sign up for either a free or paid account, please visit www.projectpipe.com. Once again, thank you very much, and have a good day.