This tutorial takes about 25 minutes and is intended for all users of Ketura.
Your personalized Home Page presents a simple, but sophisticated, interface that enables you effectively to manage the work assigned to you. The Home Page is discussed in detail in the Ketura Tour Step 7: The Home Page.
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.
In this tutorial, you step into the shoes of Andrew Wright, XYZ’s office administrator and manager, and use his Home Page to manage his work.
Ketura provides personalized Pending and In progress task lists on your Home Page. Together, these show all the tasks of issues in current milestones of active projects that are assigned to you. These are the tasks that the relevant project managers wish you to be working upon.
Why two lists? Tasks in current milestones of active projects that have been planned for you appear automatically in the Pending list, sorted in the order that the project manager expects you to work on them (earliest work at the top). For complicated projects, the list of pending tasks could be very large. A single list could therefore contain an overwhelming number of tasks. Instead, you can select just a few tasks to work on at a time from the Pending list, transferring them to your In progress list. You can then focus upon those few tasks, switching between them with ease.
A third user-related task list exists on the Planned tasks tab of the Manage User page for each user (reachable by following the appropriate user id link from the Users tab of the Manage Users page). This shows the tasks that are planned for the user on active projects, but which are not yet on a current milestone
and which therefore do not appear on a user’s Pending or In progress tabs.
Ketura has another feature to prevent users from being overwhelmed by a huge number of pending tasks. For each project, a
project manager designates one particular milestone as being current. Only incomplete tasks from issues in each project’s
current milestone, and those preceding it, are shown in your Pending tab. Thus, you typically only see only those outstanding tasks from the current milestone of each project. This has the further
advantage that you are not distracted (or tempted to start work upon) work in milestones later than the current one.
This tab shows the tasks that are waiting for you to work upon, grouped by issue.
The tasks in this list are shown in the order that the project manager expects you to undertake work, taking into account factors such as the order of milestones within a project, the relative issue priority within each milestone and the allocation of your time to various projects. Therefore, you should generally endeavour to complete tasks higher up in the list before commencing those further down.
You have decided that you want to move T1054 of I1010, and the three tasks of I1014, to your In progress list, as you intend to start working on them shortly.
The work journal is discussed in detail later on in this tutorial.
This tab shows the tasks on which you are currently working, grouped by issue. As you have already seen, you are in complete control of which tasks from your Pending tab are moved into this list. You can therefore choose to focus on a few tasks at a time.
Like the Pending list, tasks are shown here in the order that the project manager expects you to undertake work.
It is recommended that you periodically monitor your Pending tab to see whether tasks have been assigned to you that are scheduled to be completed sooner than those already on your In progress tab.
In this scenario, you have decided that you are going to start work on task T1074 (on issue I1014), and that you are going to record the time spent on the task in your work journal.
Let’s now assume that you wish to start work on T1055 (on issue I1010).
You have decided that you are too busy to work on task T1055 for the moment, and therefore wish to move the task back to the Pending tab.
You can select several tasks and move them to the Pending tab in one go.
You have finished work on task T1054, and therefore want to mark that task as complete.
You can select several tasks and mark them all as complete in one go.
What happens if the expected work remaining for a task in your In progress or Pending tabs differs significantly from your current best estimate? You should revise the estimate. This immediately makes the manager of the task’s project aware of your revised estimate, enabling him or her to plan the remainder of the project accordingly.
You have decided that task T1076 is going to take you another 10 hours to complete.
You can update the work remaining estimates for several of your tasks in one go.
As already seen, the Home Page contains a tab for your work journal. An entry is created in the work journal every time you start timing work for a task. The work journal therefore acts as a historical record of the work that you have undertaken on various tasks.
What happens if you forget to start or stop a timer for a particular task at the appropriate time, or if you undertake work while out of the office and are unable to access Ketura? The Work journal tab accommodates this situation by enabling you retrospectively to create or modify entries on particular tasks.
You have realized that you need to create a work journal entry for the work you did on task T1299 this morning.
You can create several empty work journal entries by clicking the New Entry button repeatedly. This can be convenient if you wish manually to record work on several different tasks.
The Your Activity Analysis page shows the work you have undertaken over a period of time, broken down in a number of useful ways. If you have permission to view cost information, you can also see how much the work you have undertaken has cost your organization.
Select the Work journal tab.
The same information can be viewed for other users in their management pages (global Users navigation tab > Users tab > user id link > Activity by project tab).
