This tutorial outlines a series of steps to follow to navigate the Program Area pages, and manage a program task and its outputs in order to finish a task.

This tutorial builds on actions from previous tutorials in the series.  Before completing this tutorial, you or someone in your organization should have completed:

Before you start, log into the Program Management application.

Step 1: Navigate to your Program

Before you can view program status in any detail, or manage tasks and outputs, you need to select a Program.

  • Open the All Programs page by clicking on the All Programs item in the navigation bar at the top of the page.
  • If you followed the tutorial "Creating and Setting up a Program", you should be able to find a Program named "Tutorial".
  • If you cannot see the program named "Tutorial" because there are other programs in the list, you may filter for it by entering the name "Tutorial" in the program filter text field.
  • Click on the "Tutorial" program to open the Program Area for that program.

Step 2: Find you way around the Program Area

If you followed the previous step, you should see the Program Home page for the "Tutorial" program. Program Home is part of the Program Area.

The Program Area includes the Program Home page, Program Folders and Program Setup, all accessible from the Program Navigation Menu in the left sidebar. The Program Area also allows access to the task views and task output views for the program.

Step 3: View and understand Task status

  • Notice the Program properties displayed at the top of the page.
  • Look at the the Program tasks below the Program properties. Scroll down if you need to.
  • Notice the Status column. Each task has a status: Not Started, Started, Requires Review, or Finished.
  • To begin with, all tasks are "Not Started". To start a Task, you must start progress on its task outputs. We will look at task outputs in the next step.

Step 4: Manage Task Outputs

Assignees to program tasks, approvers, program managers and other users can interact with your program through tasks and task outputs. Changes in the task outputs can affect the lifecycle state of the outputs and the task status.

A task has a lifecycle, which begins with No Data, meaning no data has been added to the task yet. Some tasks don't require any data (we represent that with the Default output type) but they still begin in the No Data state.

Task Outputs: Forms

We will see what happens when you interact with a task output to add some data and set it as ready.

  • Click on the Add Material Specification task to open the task view. You can either click it in the sidebar menu, or you can click on it in the Program Home page summary.
  • The Task View opens showing the outputs for the task. The right sidebar shows some metadata about the task including the assignee, creation date, actual start date and the list of task dependencies. 

  • Notice the task output for Material Specification contains a table showing material specification information, but none has been filled in yet.
  • Click the header of the Material Specification output to go to the Data Item View. You can only navigate to the Data Item View if you have write access on the program.

  • The Material Specification is now presented as a form with inputs the user can fill in. Enter some information into the form then click the SAVE button to save it.
  • Notice the lifecycle state of the Material Specification has changed to Work In Progress. Note: this action also changes the status of the Task to Started. A task's status follows from the lifecycle state of its outputs.
  • When you are ready, click the SET AS READY button to indicate the form is completed.
  • Notice the task output has changed to Approved. This is the final state for a task output.

Task Outputs: Files and Approvals

Now we will see what happens when you interact with a different type of task output, one that requires files. In addition we will see how the lifecycle states of the files output are different when an approval is required.

Note: the following steps assume you have followed the steps from the previous tutorial, Creating and Setting up a Program, to add an approval requirement to the BOM task.

  • Click on the EBOM task in the sidebar menu to open the EBOM task view.
  • The Task View opens showing the EBOM task output.

  • Click on the Task output header to open the Task output view.
  • Add some data by clicking the UPLOAD FILES button.
  • In the Upload Files dialog, in the Selected folder section, select the top-level folder for the Program.

  • You should see the Selected files panel has expanded. Click SELECT FILES to pick one or more files from your local machine to upload. Choose any files you like.
  • When ready, click the UPLOAD FILES button.
  • The files are added to the EBOM task output view.
  • Click on the SET AS READY button to indicate the files are ready for approval.
  • The task output now shows as Awaiting Approval. There are several options: REVERT TO IN PROGRESS, REWORK REQUIRED or APPROVE.

  • An appropriate user should approve the task output. For now, you should click APPROVE yourself.
  • The EBOM task output should now show as Approved.

Step 5: Task Status revisited

As a final step, let's take a look again at the Program Home page and inspect the task status for the two tasks we have now modified and approved.

  • Click the Program Home link from the navigation menu.
  • Scroll down to see the workflow table.
  • You should see the task status is shown as Finished for both tasks we have worked on.

Done

Congratulations, you have completed the tutorial series!

Click to go back to the Tutorials page.