Project Insight manages projects from Initiation through Project Closure also known as the entire Project Life Cycle. However your team starts, executes and closes a project, PI can organize, report, and centralize your process all in one solution.

Project Statuses

Project Statuses are the different stages of a Project Life Cycle your projects may go through: Project Status for Administrators

These Statuses are supposed to allow you to filter for those “Active” projects or “Inactive” projects you may or may not want to see on reports, dashboards, home screens, etc.: Project Status for Project Managers

Examples of our default statuses include Planning, Active, On Hold because Planning and On Hold projects should not be visible to Team Members who are trying to execute live projects.

Project Phase

Phases are stage gates entirely within a project plan. If Statuses are about the functionality of showing a live project to the Team Members, then Phases are about where the project is in a project that is already live and executing.

Think of each Project Phase as reportable segments of a project to help keep your team organized. Certain tasks could trigger a transition between phases.

For example, your team may have a Scoping phase for requirements gathering, a Design phase, a Building phase, and then a Customer Review phase.

Summary Tasks

This special type of task is a divider in your work breakdown structure or a "bucket" to put subtasks into. Many times Summary Tasks can be aligned with your project phases. Other times, Summary Tasks are a way to take a larger header of a work package and break it down into smaller pieces.

What's most important is a Summary Task is a roll-up of the work, durations, start/end dates, etc of all the Tasks below it.

Best practices are to not enter any information (such as Work Hours, Resources, etc) in the Summary Task line item. 

That allows the roll-up to accurately demonstrate all the subtasks information beneath.

Milestones

Milestone tasks are meant to be special markers of indicators of important places in your project. According to the rules, Milestones should not have duration or work assigned to them because they are a sign post in the ground of your project.

For example, if the task immediately preceding the milestone is "Finalize Draft with Client" then the Milestone may be "Draft Submitted to Client."

This milestone will then demonstrate "although we may have gone back and forth for a few days on the draft, the final version was officially submitted May 1st."

And your project will put a special diamond marker in place for that May 1st date to highlight its importance.

Project State

Whether a project is Open or Closed only refers to Archiving Projects. When you Archive a project, the project’s state changes to “Closed.”

One more thing...

Approvals

An approval is an item (a related item) in Project Insight that can be added to a project, a task, a document, a proposal... ANYWHERE. This can sometimes lead to confusion because your organization may want to add an approval to the end of a Phase or between Statuses or before you complete a Milestone. 

Enable the Approvals Add-On in Project Insight administration to route anything in Project Insight through an approval process.