Guided Tour

This tour of Achievo will help you setup the system after it has just been installed. We will show you the relevant parts of the system where you need to store some data before the end-users can start their use of Achievo.

The tour works best, if you have a working, fresh Achievo installation by hand to try out everything described here.

 Profiles and employees

The first thing to do after setting up Achievo is to create at least one profile and one user. It is not a good idea to use the default 'administrator' user in Achievo. It is intended for initial setup, but you should start using a regular user account as soon as possible.

The first place to look is in the 'Employees' menu. You'll find an option 'Security Profiles' there. When you click it, the right part of the screen changes to the profile management screen. A profile is a set of privileges that you can assign to users.

The profile screen is divided in two parts. The top part can be used to create a new profile, the bottom part displays existing profiles and lets you search them. (Later on you'll recognize this structure in most of Achievo's features.)

On first use, no profiles are available yet. A useful first profile is one with all access rights. Enter something along the lines of 'Managers' as name for the first profile, and click the 'Save' button. You'll now be taken to a second screen that allows you to specify in details what managers may do in Achievo. It's too early to explain all the options in detail, so for the sake of brevity, and because we want to walk through all features, let's assume Managers may do anything they like. By clicking the 'Select All' link, you enable all checkboxes at once. Near the bottom of the screen, you can click the 'save and close' button to save the profile and go back to the profile main window.

Ok, so we now have a security profile. Later on, you'll want to create some more. Useful profiles are profiles for 'Projectleaders', 'Controllers', 'Programmers' etc. But for the sake of the Tour, one profile is enough.

It's now time to create a user account. The option 'Employees' in the menu on the left takes you to the employee admin screen. The 'Employee Add' link opens a screen to enter the employee data. The important parts are: the user-is, which is used to login to Achievo, the real name, profile and password. For profile, you should select the just created 'Managers' profile. Some parts of Achievo can send mail to users, so entering a valid email address is a good thing to do.

It is not obligatory, but it is useful to add a contract for the user. In the contract, you can configure on which days the user works, and how many hours a week. There are several features in Achievo that make use of this information (for example for calculating overtime)

After you saved the user, logout of Achievo, and re-login with the user-id and password of the user you just created.

 Activities, roles and scheduletypes

After you logged in with the new user account, have a look at the Setup menu on the left. It contains the following items:

• Activities, for configuring the activities that you want to track time on.
  
• Phase templates, which are templates for phase configurations, we'll get to this later on.
  
• Project templates, which are templates for project configurations, we'll handle this together with the phase templates later on.
  
• Roles. Here you can configure the roles that people can have when taking part in a project.
  
• Organization contracts. If you have contracts with your customers (for example hosting contracts), you can define the types you have here.
  
• Schedule types. Appointments can be categorized; here you can configure the categories that you will use.

Let's focus on some of these items now (we'll get to the other ones soon).

Activities
One of Achievo's main features is time registration. When you want to keep track of how many time is spent on which projects, you can also indicate on what activity it was spent. If you don't care about such detail, one 'General' activity might suffice, but it's a good idea to distinguish between several activities. At ibuildings for example, we distinguish between activities such as 'Testing', 'Meeting', 'Development', 'Design', and we also have general activities like 'Holiday', 'Illness', 'Study' etc. Finally we have an activity named 'Other' for anything that doesn't fit in any of the other activities.

For each activity you can enable the 'Specification required' option. If you do not enable this, users can register time on the activity without specifying a remark. When you enable the option, users are required to specify a remark with details about what they did. For example for the 'Testing' activity, people would have to specify what they tested, and especially for activities like 'Other', it is a useful means of figuring out what people actually did.

Roles
Later on you will be creating projects. For each project, you can define a project team. A team consists of employees and/or contact persons from other organizations. To keep track of which team member has which function, you must indicate a role for each member. In the Roles menu item in the setup menu, you can configure what roles you will be using. For employees, useful roles are 'Developer', 'Tester', 'Project leader' etc. For external contact persons, you might add roles like 'Customer', 'Financial controller', 'Supplier' etc. You define one set of roles. You can use all roles both for employees and external contacts.

This way, you can not only track projects done completely by your own staff, but also projects that are done in cooperation with external companies.

Schedule types
When creating appointments, you can specify a category. In this menu-item, you can configure what categories the users will be able to use. Useful categories might be 'External meeting', 'Holiday', 'Private appointment', 'Internal meeting etc'. If you do not want to categorize, create at least one category like 'General'.

For each category you add, you can select a foreground and background colour. This is the colour that will be used to display the appointment in the scheduler. If you don't have too many categories, users will get used to the colourschemes and recognize appointments without having to look at the details.

Next: Adding organizations and creating projects.

 User contributed notes

Important: The user contributed notes are intended for adding comments to the manual that might be useful for other users.

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