We implemented PPM at my company recently.  We are using it for project management, time tracking, and as a repository for ALL of the documents related to the project.  As a business analyst, I'm having a hard time managing analysis and requirements documents in the Project Documents area  Is anyone else doing this?  Do you have any helpful ideas about how to easily manage documents that are being changed often, and then being reviewed and updated by other people?  Are there any tricks you've found that can help someone knew to the product?

Thanks,

Ginny

Ginny:

It sounds like the difficulty you've encountered is in the area of "versioning" your documents, and maintaining the master document?  You've got multiple people collaborating on documents?

Our Documents application inherently supports the two things you need:  1)  Approval Routing and 2)  Versioning.

I'm going to cheat and copy/paste some info here from our online Help file, under the Documents section; if you have any specific questions, please post them here and I'll keep an eye out for you.  Also, I'd encourage you to browse through the "Documents" articles in the online Help.

When you add items such as documents to a project, you can request that other project members review and approve the items. You can also specify the order in which team members need to approve an item.

Team members who are asked to approve the item are sent an Approval Notification which allows them to view the item and approve or decline it as appropriate. If a team member declines the item, you are notified and can edit it further and resubmit it for approval.

Note: Approval policy options persist and will default to your last selections.

The Approval Submit screen displays when:

• A document or dynamic application item is saved and the Submit for Approval check box has been selected.

• A timesheet is submitted and the timesheet approval policy specifies that you can select approvers.

Note: Other items may be automatically sent for approval based on settings in an approval policy. Approval policies are set up by Daptiv administrators or project managers.

TO SUBMIT AN ITEM FOR APPROVAL:

1. In the Select Approvers section:

1. To enable approval routing, select Routing Enabled. When routing is enabled, the item is sent to each approver in the order the approvers appear on the list.

2. If you do not enable routing, choose whether the item should be approved by Any Selected Members, or All Selected Members.

2. Click Browse User Directory to select team members who should approve the item.
   For details on using the directory, see Using the User Selector.

3. If approval routing is enabled, to specify the order in which approvers are sent the item for approval, click a name in the Selected Approvers list, and then click Top, Up, Down, or Bottom to reposition the name in the list. The person at the top of the list receive the item first, the second person will be sent the item second, and so on.

4. Select the Notification Options you want:

5. Notify approvers when request has been submitted—This option sends a notification to the team members you select when you upload the document(s).

6. Notify owner when request has been approved—This option sends a notification to you when the team members have approved the document(s).

7. Notify owner when request has been rejected—This options sends you a notification if the document is rejected by any of the team members.

5. In the Approval Message box, type any comments you want to include with the approval request.

6. Click Save & Close to submit the item for approval, Save & Add Another to add another item, Previous to go to the previous step, or Cancel to cancel the submission for approval and the item creation.

Use the Approvals application to view the status of items you submitted for approval. For details, see Approvals Overview.

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Max,

Thanks for the suggestion.  That will help.  But what we really need are functions like tracability (tying requirements, use cases, specs, testing together), base-lining requirements at specific times in the project, validating requirement/identifying missing requirements, and so on.  In other words, functionality that would come with requirements management tools like Rational or Quality Center.

Thanks,

Ginny