How can I model Nodes to a Project?

[manny89]

Hi All,

I am new to essential project but I have a few questions regarding which nodes are assigned to a project, and how this can be viewed as model in the essential viewer.

For example I have 3 servers assigned to the decommissioning project, as you can see from the image. This is what I want to achive in Essential Project



1. What I want to know is, when I enter the details about the node under the Technology Layer, which field do I populate to represent it is assigned to the decommissioning project?

2. How can I get this physically represented as a model in the Esstential Viewer? I want it so Project managers and various team members can simeply go to the viewer and visually see what servers are assigned to which project.

If anything needs clarifying please let me know.

Kind Regards

Manny.

[jonathan.carter]

Hi Manny,

Great question.

The idea is that we define WHAT is going to be changed in the architecture using the Strategic Plans and it's against these Plans that the planning action - such as you mention (decommission) - are defined.

In the definition of the Strategic Plan (which can be as fine-grained or as coarse grained as we need), we map that plan to all the elements that it affects, in this case the Nodes that you plan to remove.

The Project instances describe HOW we are making the change and are related to the Strategic Plans that it is supporting.

What this means to the example you give is that we can define the plans that are in place, map them to the servers and then map the Projects that are running to all the plans that each supports. The Project Summary out-of-the-box view will show the elements that are being affected by the project, although It may need to be extended to include the physical technology.

We could equally provide a view on the Node Summary that shows all the Projects that are related to that server to add to the section that already shows all Strategic Plans related to that Node. Out of the box, from the Plans, we can see the set the of Projects that are supporting it.

In terms of seeing this in a graphical way, you could create a custom view that used one of the Javascript widgets we've included to create an interactive diagram.

Jonathan

[manny89]

Thanks for the detailed reply Jonathan, highly appreciated.

Could you please provide me with any documentation or a link to the JavaScript widget to create this custom view?

Kind Regards

Manny

[manny89]

Hi All,

I've had a chance to play around with the suggestions you have said. I am slightly confused as to which sections in the class hierarchy I am supposed to be filling.

Do you have a manual or a simple tutorial I can follow to implement the suggestions you made. In theory it all makes sense, but in practice I am struggling achieve this.

Thanks for all your help so far.

Manny

[jonathan.carter]

Thanks for the detailed reply Jonathan, highly appreciated.

Could you please provide me with any documentation or a link to the JavaScript widget to create this custom view?

Kind Regards

Manny

I think the main ones to look at would be JVectorMap: http://jvectormap.owl-hollow.net

and also InfoVis:
http://thejit.org/

Have a look at both the Org Chart and Project People Network views in the OOTB pack for some examples of how to create these graphical views

Jonathan

[jonathan.carter]

Hi All,

I've had a chance to play around with the suggestions you have said. I am slightly confused as to which sections in the class hierarchy I am supposed to be filling.

Do you have a manual or a simple tutorial I can follow to implement the suggestions you made. In theory it all makes sense, but in practice I am struggling achieve this.

Thanks for all your help so far.

Manny

I don't think we've got any publicly-available tutorials on the site about these. However, the idea is that you create instances of a Strategic Plan (you can use Technology Strategic Plans for Technology things and Application Strategic Plans for Application things etc.)
You give this plan a name, e.g. "Decommission my old servers" and you can add a description. You then map this Plan to the elements that are affected. In this case our old Servers which are modelled as instances of Technology Node.

We can associate a planning action with the plan, in this case it would be 'Decommission' as we want to remove these old servers. We can also define the time frame in which we expect the plan to be executed using the Valid from and Valid to dates.

We also have a slot on the Plan to map it to the Change Activities (which can be Programmes or Projects) that will make this plan happen. This structure means that a Plan can be supported by more than one Change Activity and a Change Activity can support more than one Plan.

When we try to create a new instance of a Change Activity, Protege will ask us whether this is a Programme or Project or Project Activity and on this we can capture the actual start and end dates, the stakeholders involved in delivering it.

Jonathan

[manny89]

Thanks for the last reply Jonathan, worked like a treat, just what I was after.

One small comment I've had from colleagues is the amount of heading sections on screen. My question is how can I turn off certain headings and only keep the ones I desire.

For example in the image below, by default all the headings are shown and I have to individually filter them off one by one. How do I change the option to enforce only certain headings to show once the page is loaded?



Thanks for your help so far, highly appreciated.

Kind Regards
Manny

[jonathan.carter]

Hi Manny.

Although each View template has different sections (which means that we can't use a single common XSL template to control these), we use the same approach on all of them.

A simple tweak to the Views that are being a nuisance can switch the ones that are less important to be OFF by default.

If we take the example that you've shown (technology/core_tl_tech_node_summary.xsl). Go to line: 298 and you can see the definition for each of the filters.

From line 306 onwards, are some good examples such as:

Code: Select all

<div class="componentFilterElement">
    <form class="checkbox">
        <input type="checkbox" id="component_Description" checked="checked" />

            <span class="componentFilterElementLabel">
                <a href="#sectionDescription">
                    <xsl:value-of select="eas:i18n('Description')"/>
                </a>
						
            </span>

    </form>
</div>


All we need to do to make it OFF by default is to remove the checked="checked" attribute on the <input> tag, like on the About section (line 298 - 305)

Code: Select all

<div class="componentFilterElement">
    <form class="checkbox">
        <input type="checkbox" id="component_Description" />

            <span class="componentFilterElementLabel">
                <a href="#sectionDescription">
                    <xsl:value-of select="eas:i18n('Description')"/>
                </a>
						
            </span>

    </form>
</div>


Then just save the XSL and reload the View. No need to restart Tomcat or re-publish.

Regards

Jonathan

[manny89]

Bit of an update on my progress and a few questions.

The way I am representing which server needs to be decommissioned is by assigning it a strategic plan. This is great because it shows me all the nodes impacted and any dependences, which is exactly what we need.

Only problem is I need a view to show me a list of all the strategic plans, so the various project teams can simply click on the plan instead of going through each node in the "Technology Node Summary" View. Essentially the strategic plans have become my project view, so for example:

Server 1 , 2 , 3 are linked to the FTP project under the strategic plan.



I have linked the strategic plan with a delivery project (Change_Activity - Project) however in that view I cannot show the list of impacted nodes or which strategic plan this project supports.

In summary my questions are:

1. How can I get a list of all strategic plans in the essential viewer (Which tab does this come under).
2. How can I show strategic plans in the project summary section?

Thanks for your support in advance.

Kind Regards

Manny

[jonathan.carter]

Hi Manny,

Sounds like some good progress.

I'm not sure that we have a Strategic Plan catalogue view in the OOTB set, although it would fairly straightforward to create one based on any of the OOTB catalogues - just that you'd be listing instances of the Strategic_Plan (and it's sub-types) class.

Probably the Programme Summary would be the best starting point as this is a catalogue of all the Programmes and the Projects within each. You could create a new catalogue from this that listed the Strategic Plans on the left hand column and then the supporting Projects on the right. The table is search-able and sortable.

Similarly, to show the Strategic Plans that a Project supports is a quick extension of the OOTB Project Summary. It needs a new section included in the Summary View to query for the supported Strategic Plans and then render each one of those. If you use the RenderInstanceLink template, you'll get a hyperlink that will enable you to navigate to the Strategic Plan summary. Again, the OOTB summary page will have many examples of how this is done.

All the view templates are by definition open-source, so you can see how it all works and can make changes that you need. And it's all based on standard web technologies (HTML, Javascript, XML, XSLT).

Having said all that if you would like to use any of our Essential Services, we'd be delighted to build these views for you - and most view development work is very quick, typically a day or so.

Jonathan

[manny89]

Quick update on my progress since my last post. The tool is really coming along nicely. We've found the tool has become a centralized location where people can find all the information they need in one place.

We have mainly been focusing on the technology layers and EA principles section, however we're now trying to populate the business layer with an org chart.

I have followed the manual for the organization chart, however. The only problem I am having is I'm not to sure what section on the modeler I need to populate to show the Service Owners & Functions/Services section.

Do I need to populate a section under the Business Layer / Physical / Actor ...... or Essential Viewer / Report_Constant / Org Model - Root???

Thanks,
Manny

[jonathan.carter]

Hi Manny,

Great to hear that you're making good progress.

To capture the Organisation Model, we use Group Actors (for teams/divisions) and Individual Actors for the real people in each team. We can use the Group Actor for things as small as a particular team or as large as the organisation itself - and it's that organisation's Group Actor that we use to for the Root Actor Report Constant.

This constant is used by the Org Chart View so that it knows where to start. From there it can navigate the sub-divisions and sub-teams (the contained Actors) to find the whole Organisation.

In terms of things like Services - assuming you mean 'business' services - we use the Product class for those. If your organisation is a service organisation, then your products are services.

You also mentioned Functions. Again, assuming you mean business functions in terms of WHAT the business does, we use the Business Capability class to capture those. If you mean Business Functions in terms of the structure of the organisation, then we would use the Group Actor for them.

How do these things relate to the organisation?
Actors (teams or individuals) play Roles when they perform a Physical Process. These physical processes are defined by instances of Business Process that describe how the process is performed. In turn, the Business Processes realise the Business Capabilities.

The Products are related to the processes that are performed in order to deliver that Product (whether it's a widget or a service).

These classes will have specific slots to relate specific Actors such as owners but any element can have one or more Stakeholders defined against them. Each stakeholder is defined using an Actor to Role Relation, which shows the role a particular Actor is playing as a stakeholder. This gives us an open-ended capability to describe any stakeholders (owners, consumers, managers, etc.) that we might need.

Jonathan