Budget & Cost Data in Team Concert
I had a customer ask me recently if they could include budget & cost information in Team Concert. Has anyone thought of doing something like this?
My initial idea was to add a budget work item and expense work item to Team Concert. Labor costs could be tracked on the task work item. With some Cognos magic, I'm thinking I could show budget vs. cost.
I realize this was not the intended purpose of the tool and that there are better tools for accounting, but does this idea of adding it to Team Concert sound feasible? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
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2 answers
Ralph Schoon (63.1k●3●36●46)
| answered Mar 21 '13, 11:54 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER edited Mar 21 '13, 11:57 a.m.
Hi Carson, we have an example for cost in https://jazz.net/library/article/1093 Lab4/Lab5.
If you store some budget data somewhere where it is accessible I assume you can do the math. One exotic example could do the math based on a relationship between the work items. See http://rsjazz.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/rtc-update-parent-duration-estimation-and-effort-participant/ This follows a parent child relationship, but it would also be possible to find the work item using a configurable number or use a relationship, even a custom one. I would probably prefer a configurable solution, there the participant gets the number of a work item and looks that up. There could be rules about how to look up the budgets from there. Budgets could all be stored in the work item, so that configuring one work item in the process XML is enough. You certainly don't want to have to manually maintain relationships from the budget requesting work items to the thing that holds the budget. I am not sure if it is always such a good approach to try to put everything into a tool like RTC, but you certainly have options if you are creative. |
Honestly, it gets very tricky when you begin to go into the realm of Project Management metrics. RTC was never really meant to do project management, and you mention this. However it seems to have 90% of the data that you would be looking for from a project management perspective. The issue is that remaining 10% (like budget, cost, resource allocation, etc.).
If you go out and look at the OSLC working groups, you can see that there are some areas that begin to touch on this (like the ALM-PLM Interoperability and the Estimation and Measurement groups). In fact, the Estimation and Measurement page has a link to software project management, but it is a dead link.
As Ralph points out, you can extend RTC to cover these things. My only question is how this would be impacted by OSLC changes and additions in the future. The thing thast you want to keep in mind is that you want to be able to access this data using REST, so you can reference it from the project/product management tools that you are currently using, or might use in the future.
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