[rt-users] RT for Project Management

[Ken Crocker]

Bryan,

RT (3.x ) is an issue tracking tool, not a Project Management tool. 
There are no built-in charts and reports for such, as RT lets you devise 
your own.
There are many Project Management (PM) and Portfolio Project Management 
(PPM) tools out there, they cost a bit of money to either use their 
system (SaaS/OnDemand) or to get their software installed "in house". I 
believe Project.Net is "open-source" so they would be a good pick for a 
total PPM package. @Task is a good one (PPM), but it costs.
The PPM software available is also broken up by orientation (ie. IT PPM 
or Business PPM, etc.).
 I believe that RT 4.x is headed in that direction. Hopefully, it will 
be a good competitive product with Project.net & @TASK. From what I've 
seen of RT, I think it will.

However, using the RT version we have available, many things will need 
to be added by you. First, you need to have an idea of what your 
infrastructure will be. You need to have a WorkFlow process in place for 
Reviewing & approving a ticket initially, the development done for a 
ticket, and the QA aproval process.

This is important because all your work, new Queues, Groups, what work 
will be in what Queues, what groups have rights to what work/Queues, 
etc. will be based on that infrastructure/Workflow rules. The scrips you 
write, both for notifications and for added functionality (like 
pre-setting ticket owners based on a Custom Field value OR automatically 
changing the status of a ticket because a ticket was "QA approvd", like 
resolving a ticket does) will all require consistency within that 
agreed-upon infrastructure. Even the names you give Queues and groups 
should have a consistency/convention that gives some structure to the 
whole thing.

Once this is done, you will be able to decide what Queues to create, 
groups of users, rights, what Custom Fields to create for which Queues 
and how they will be used for ticket processing.

The Parent/Child/DependsOn Links that RT allows will easily fit into a 
simple Query, but trying to get all the due dates of each 
Parent/Child/DependsOn relationship will require a bit more complicated 
SQL than you will get with RT Query.

So, until you have the infrastructure and workflow processes and naming 
conventions worked out, it would be hard suggest what you asked for.

I hope I didn't go too far in answering your question.;-).

Kenn
LBNL

On 7/23/2009 12:00 PM, Bryan Ellinger wrote:
> All,
>
> I would like to get started using RT for PM of a hardware, software integration project. There has been talk on this list about
> using RT for project management. However, I have not read much about how others are doing it.
> For instance, what is the most sensible way to set up queues? It seems like it might be good to give each group, e.g. SW
> engineering, HW engineering, Applications Engineering etc., their own queue. But how would one determine which tickets belong to
> which of many possible projects? Should each project have it's own queue instead?
> Anyone care to share how they apply RT to their general PM processes? It would be a big help to me.
>
> Sincerely,
> Bryan
>
> Bryan D. Ellinger <ellinger at adi.com>
> Applications Engineer
> Applied Dynamics International
> 3800 Stone School Road
> Ann Arbor, MI 48108
> 734.973.1300 ext. 289
> 734.668.0012 Fax
> http://www.adi.com, mailto:support at adi.com
>
>
>
>
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