Project Plan

Polarion's approach to creating a project plan is probably different from that of other project planning tools you may have used. With Polarion, you create Work Items for everything that must be done to complete the project. These are assigned to team members to process. You create Time Points corresponding to milestones like iterations and releases. As part of your planning, assign Work Items to these. On each Work Item, you and/or team members estimate the amount of time needed to resolve it. You also need to check your available working time as configured in the global Working Calendar (open Repository, then Administration Work Items Working Calendar) and have your team members configure their personal Working Calendar in their user account page.

With this data in place, Polarion takes over and automatically builds a project plan which is displayed in the form of a GANTT chart in the Dashboard topic and the Live Plan view of the Work Items topic. There you can immediately see if the project looks realistic to complete in the time points and who is over or undertasked in what time frame. You can then make adjustments to mile stones and time estimates before the project is implemented. As team members resolve Work Items during the course of the project, the Live Plan is updated automatically. You can always tell if the project is on track, lagging behind, or at risk of getting bogged down in the near future.

You should read the sections on Project planning. Some aspects of the Live Plan project planning engine are configurable, so you may also want to review Configure Planning. If you have stakeholders who use Microsoft Project, or you have a project defined with that tool that you want to import into Polarion, see Import from Microsoft Project and Export to Microsoft Project.