This optional field allows project teams to assign a custom status to individual project solutions within SLIM-Collaborate. In the Estimation stage, the solution status is used to track the progression of alternative solutions through your organization’s workflow steps (initial, revised, approved, etc.), alert team members when “next step” actions should be performed, filter/sort projects in the Project List, and even (if this feature has been configured by your site admin) serve as a signal to manually launch calls to external applications or utilities from the project toolbar. Closeout projects are different, because in the closeout stage there is only one solution (the current one, which may still reflect estimated time, effort, size, and defects if the project has just been advanced to closeout or may have been updated to reflect the project’s final/actual performance data). Solution workflow statuses are a great way to alert team members whether they are working with estimated or final/actual metric values once a project has completed. The differences between multi-solution Estimation projects and single-solution Closeout projects are reflected in the way solution statuses are set for projects in each lifecycle stage.
Regardless of lifecycle stage, the solution workflow status field is not visible on the Project Settings tab of an Estimation or Closeout project until your site administrator has defined one or more workflow statuses in the Admin Site’s lookup tables.
Once one or more workflow statuses have been configured via the Admin Site, editing of the Solution Workflow status differs by lifecycle stage:
•Estimation stage: the field is visible (but cannot be edited) on the Project Settings tab for the current solution. Logged solutions can be assigned a workflow status via the Edit Solution Log dialog.
•Closeout stage: since closeout projects have only one solution and
no solution log, the field is visible and editable on the Project
Settings tab.
Using solution workflow statuses is one way to streamline enterprise-wide collaboration and build your processes into SLIM-Collaborate. As projects move through various lifecycle stages and alternate planning scenarios or solutions are considered, managers can update the current solution status to inform stakeholders that previous process steps have completed and notify them that the next step in the process now requires their attention.
Remember: Estimation Service projects have multiple solutions, and each solution can have a unique workflow status. Balanced risk solutions used for comparison do not have a status. The current solution’s status is preserved when the project is advanced to the next stage, and should be updated once final/actual time, effort, size, and defect data have been entered. This field has no counterpart in SLIM-Estimate or SLIM-DataManager.