How Can I Track Project Changes?

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Hello everyone, thanks for joining us this week. I’m Nic from Cloud Coach and today we’re answering the question how can I track project changes? Now we know that whenever we’re working on projects changes always come up and of course we want to be able to track them so we can report on actuals versus estimates.

I’m going to start by looking at this project ‘CRM Implementation’ and double click to go to our Gantt. In this use case we’re working on our project and we’re about to start this first task but we’ve noticed that we’re going to be delayed and we’re going to need an extra couple weeks on this project. Now, we could just of course change the duration but really we want to track this. So, for that we’re going to use Cloud Coach Tickets.

Right over here in the management panel I’m going to click on Tickets, and you can see here we have this quick entry option. Now, the great thing about quick entry is that I can use this to create tickets for things like change requests, issues, and risks, and of course this is fully configurable. So, here in a change request I can go in and say “timeline delay” and I can put in whatever kind of information it is we need to capture here: give it a status, open or closed, we can set up things like priorities, and put in fields for things like justification for change, delay waiting for client, or something like that.

We can put all that kind of information in there, we can save it, and then I can go back to this project—I’m going to click off this task and then go right back into it—and now we can see here is my brand-new ticket I’ve created for that change request. We can see it’s open, there’s a time line delay, and if I click into that it’s going to open the ticket itself. Again, this area is fully configurable, so we can add in whatever kind of fields we need. So, we can of course capture more information, things like planning for implementation effect on timeline and affected systems. We can even build an automation to change the duration or the estimated hours from the ticket itself. The important thing though is not only are we capturing this information here, but if we go back to the project we can see when it’s open and when it’s closed.

Now, I can go back one step further to my Cross Project Gantt and I can look at all of my projects, including my CRM Implementation. I’m going to click off it and then click back on, and I’m now I’m looking at the project level. If I click on Tickets I can now see all my tickets that roll up here, so there’s that change we’ve just made. So, as a project manager I can go through my projects here, click through them, and I can see all of my open tickets, all of my open change requests, and I can track exactly what changes are happening on my project.

So, there you go, a simple way you can track those changes using change requests in Cloud Coach Tickets. Thanks for joining us again, and of course make sure to come back next week where we answer another question in just two minutes.