Department of Engineering

Centaur - Guide for Creating Projects

This page covers aspects of Centaur, the Department's time management system, specific to creating and cloning new Projects. The Centaur homepage contains general information about Centaur which is necessary background for understanding this page.

Users with a managerial responsibility, either for a Group or for managing their own work, can create new projects or make a copy/clone of an existing project to represent some sub-set of that project, e.g. one workshop may help another with a piece of work or someone may make a copy of a relatively generic project to represent the particular area of it that they are working on. Note that making a clone of project also provides a mechanism to import a project from one Group's list to another.

Points to Consider before Creating a Project

When considering whether and how to create a new Project various options should be considered:

  • Does an existing rule apply for the group in question which makes the decision for you? E.g. some workshops create a new Project for each job they take on.
  • A proliferation of Projects may cause problems: long and cumbersome lists for users to select from; and also an increased risk of an existing suitable Project not being found and yet another one created.
  • Proliferation of Projects may not be such an issue if the Project being created is of limited duration since Projects which have been closed do not show up on the selection lists.
  • Would using an existing Project with an appropriate Task description be a more appropriate solution? This avoids a proliferation of Projects but the Task description is simply free-format text on the Timesheet and is not shareable with another user so the work done by each on the common task will be aggregated in reports at the Project level along with various other tasks.
  • If a new Project is to be created, should it be a clone of an existing Project or a completely new top-level Project? When a Project is created as a clone of another the link is retained for reporting purposes and this may be useful in grouping information for management purposes.
  • When a new Project is created, a cost centre should normally be specified. It is possible to leave this to be filled in each time on the Timesheet but this is normally to be avoided as it is easy for mistakes to be made on the Timesheet and hence costs wrongly attributed. The correct choice of cost centre is very important as it is used to charge the activity, e.g. to a research grant or general departmntal funds, and it is also used for the top level grouping of activities on most reports.
  • When a new Project is created, the requester will normally be specified. This is usually sraightforward but it must established that the requester is authorised to commit expenditure on the cost centre specified. It is possible to leave the requester to be filled in each time on the Timesheet but this should only be done if the person responsible for the cost centre has approved this type of use. This is used in cases where it useful to be able to keep track of who is making use of an ongoing service, like generic divisional IT support, on a day-to-day basis, rather than for Projects representing a specific piece of work being commissioned by the requestor.