About Projects

Serena Business Manager simplifies the process of managing an organization's work efforts by enforcing a process for these efforts. Application workflows are defined in SBM Composer and determine how work efforts, referred to as primary items, are tracked as they move through the established process.

Projects serve as storage bins for primary items and enable you to organize groups of items in a way that makes sense for your workflow. For example, you can create projects to store items for each team working on a product, or you can create projects for each version of the product. You can then configure the project by overriding specific workflow properties. You control access to items in the project by enabling roles for the project or assigning privileges to users and groups.

After you deploy an application from SBM Composer, you create projects in SBM Application Administrator and assign them to workflows. Once projects are established and contain primary items, users can create reports that provide critical information about the items in projects. This structure provides visibility and control over your processes.

Key Benefits

Organize items tracked in your process by team, function, or other categories.
Control access to items by enabling roles for specific projects or assigning privileges to users and groups for specific projects.
Create reports based on items in projects.
Use overrides to tailor certain settings inherited from the workflow.
Use inheritance to easily assign parent project properties, privileges, and role assignments to any or all sub-projects.

About the Project Hierarchy, Inheritance, and Overrides

Projects follow a hierarchy structure that allows for flexibility and easy maintenance of project settings through inheritance.

Each application typically has a set of parent projects assigned to corresponding workflows. Projects inherit settings from these workflows. You can override workflow settings at a parent project, and child projects can inherit these settings when you select the Use Parent Project's Workflow checkbox on the General page for the project. Or, you can override settings at a child project, if necessary.

In addition, applications may have sibling projects, which can have a unique set of overrides.

Tip: To ease maintenance, overrides should be applied at the highest level possible. For example, if a workflow is used for two sets of projects, apply overrides at the parent of each project set.

The Base Project

All projects are ultimately children of the Base Project, which sits at the top of the project hierarchy. The Base Project is a header project and cannot be deleted; therefore, it always exists. Primary items cannot be submitted into the base project.

When you apply settings for the Base Project, you are essentially applying settings for all projects in the system. Some of these settings can be overridden for specific projects or a set of projects. For details, refer to Enabling System Settings From the Base Project.

To navigate to the Base Project, select All Projects at the top of the Process Apps/Applications list.

About Projects Provided by Quick Administrator

To accelerate the setup process, a project is automatically created for each application workflow and sub-workflow in a process app after it is deployed for the first time. These projects inherit all properties from the workflow to which they are assigned, including the project name. If the workflow name includes the word "Workflow", it is replaced by "Project". For example, if your workflow is named "Widgets Workflow," a project named "Widgets Project" is created and assigned to the Widgets Workflow.

Projects added by Quick Administrator are set to allow new items to be submitted and to use the parent project's item numbering sequence. You can modify these settings as needed, as well as rename the project or add sub-projects. You must also manually assign roles to these projects, if applicable.