This tutorial takes about 30 minutes and is intended primarily for project managers.
A project is a planned undertaking directed towards achieving a particular goal. In Ketura, projects comprise a sequence of milestones. Each milestone contains the issues that must be resolved for the milestone to be completed. For more information, see Ketura Tour Step 4: Projects and Milestones.
This tutorial covers:
This tutorial assumes that you have the example database installed. This database illustrates various Ketura concepts applied to a fictional firm, XYZ, Inc.
XYZ has decided to implement a quality management system (qms), a set of procedures covering all of their activities conforming to ISO 9001 
. In this tutorial, a project is created to manage all activity related to the qms.
Ensure that you are logged onto the example database as Eric Samet, a partner at XYZ. Eric’s log on id is ‘es’, and the password for this account is the same as the password
for the ‘admin’ account that was provided during the installation of the Ketura server.
The Manage Projects page gives an overview of the projects in the system.
The implementation of the quality management system involves a number of key stages: research and planning, implementation and ongoing maintenance. Each key stage can be represented in Ketura as a milestone.
On the Manage Projects page follow the Implement Quality Management System link. The Manage Project Implement Quality Management System page appears.
Select the Milestones tab.
Three new milestones are added to a new project automatically. You can delete or modify any or all of these if you wish. The
milestones are:
For the Desired completion date field, click the ... button and select a date one month in the future.
The Desired completion date is the date by which the project’s manager wishes all work on the milestone to be finished. This is simply used as a point
in time against which a project manager can measure a milestone’s predicted expected and planned completion dates. It is shown
on Gantt charts by an orange diamond.
Under the Users start work on this milestone text, choose the Separately, as soon as each user has completed his or her work on previous milestones radio button.
The radio buttons enable you to indicate whether you want users to start work on the milestone together or separately. If
the first milestone in the project was being updated, these radio buttons would not exist as users will always start together
on an initial milestone.
For the Desired completion date field, click the ... button and Make the desired completion date one month later than that of the previous milestone.
The Desired completion date is the date by which the project’s manager wishes all work on the milestone to be finished. This is simply used as a point
in time against which a project manager can measure a milestone’s predicted expected and planned completion dates. It is shown
on Gantt charts by an orange diamond.
Create an additional milestone ‘M3 – Maintenance’. Make the desired completion date for each subsequent milestone one month later than that of the previous milestone, and the milestone of type Separately.
The X1 – Deferred Issues milestone is now out of order, as it should be the last milestone of the project. To address this:
An active project could, potentially, contain many milestones, each with dozens (or even hundreds) of issues. Users would quickly become overwhelmed if all the tasks of all the issues in such a project were to be shown in the In progress and Pending task lists on users’ Home pages. Because of this, Ketura allows you to designate a particular milestone as being current. Only the tasks from the milestone, and those preceding it in the project, are shown to users in their In Progress and Pending tabs. When most of the issues in the current milestone have been resolved, the project manager can designate the next milestone as being current. This has the added benefit that users will not be tempted to start work on milestones later than the one that the project manager is currently pursuing.
Since XYZ is currently in the research and planning phase of this project, it makes sense to mark milestone M1 as current. That way, only tasks of issues from M1, and O1, which precedes it, will be shown to users. They will not be overwhelmed by further tasks from issues in milestones M2 and M3.
The current milestone (and any preceding it) is highlighted in yellow.
At this point, many issues would typically be created and added to the appropriate project milestones. For the purposes of this step, we shall create a single new issue and then reschedule it to add it to milestone M1.
The steps above mimic the typical pattern for new issues related to established projects. Someone creates an issue, and it
is automatically added to a ‘Review New Issues’ milestone. The workflow for the issue will also typically have added a task
to the issue for someone to review it. If the ‘Review New Issues’ milestone to which the issue has been added is current,
and on an active project, that task will show up automatically in the appropriate person’s Pending task list on the Home Page.
Once an issue has been created, it will need to be reviewed by someone (such as a project manager or product manager). Let’s assume that we have reviewed the issue just created, and that we have decided to schedule it on milestone ‘M1 – Research and Planning’. The easiest way to do this is with the Reschedule issue section on the Schedule tab of an issue’s page.
In the Reschedule issue section, check the first checkbox, and ensure that the drop-down list box next to it shows Move.
It is often necessary to reschedule an issue completely, changing the issue’s milestone and state and, possibly, reassigning
some of the issue’s tasks. For example, this often occurs when a manager decides what to do with a newly created issue. The
Reschedule issue section makes such rescheduling quick and easy, bringing together the necessary actions in one convenient place.
If you are setting up a new project milestone, you might want to create new issues and have them directly scheduled to that milestone, without having to go to the bother of rescheduling each issue. You can do this using the Add Issue... button on the Issues tab on a milestone page. Use the Add new issue tab of the page that then appears.
It is possible to add a number of issues to a milestone in several ways:
Unless you have unchecked the Automatically create a topic for each new project checkbox on the Issue topics tab of the Manage Projects page, Ketura will have automatically created a new issue topic with the same name as your project. Furthermore, it will have configured the workflow for that topic so that any new issues about that topic will be added automatically to your new project’s ‘O1 – Review New Issues (ongoing)’ milestone. This means that you don’t have to worry about creating new issue topics manually, or about workflow, unless you desire more fine-grained control over your system.
