This section applies to anyone who wants a deep understanding of project and work management using the app with a specific focus for Project Managers (PM), both Civilian who we define as casual part-time PMs and Professional PMs.

Important: If you are not familiar with the Projects and Work areas, we recommend you review the Overview of Projects and Work areas. It will provide you with a working knowledge of these areas in Sensei IQ.

You will be taken through the complete project life cycle, from Project Initiation to Planning, on to Execution or Delivery and finishing with Closing the project.

A project manager in Sensei IQ is mainly responsible for:

• Creating a new project;
  
  All new projects should be created in the Projects area as this ensures that the project is classified by project type, which in turn defines the project governance and support items for the project. 
  
  Next, you select the execution tool for the project, either the native Sensei IQ Schedule or synchronization with external tools such as Project Online, Project for the web, Azure Boards or Jira.
  

• Creating the project schedule;
  
  With the project defined, the next step is to move to building the project team, identifying the work, establishing dependencies, if appropriate for the delivery approach, assigning resources and estimating the work.
  
  You do this by either developing the project schedule natively in Sensei IQ or by linking the IQ project to an existing project being managed in a third party execution tool.
  

• Finalizing the project plan;
  
  With the project schedule developed, the next step is to confirm how well the current schedule aligns to the initial expectations for the key dates, deliverables and budget recorded at the time the project was approved.
  
  With the project delivery approach confirmed, you would then create resource requests to formally request and confirm the allocation of all enterprise resources to the project. 
  
  Next, you should create the initial project status report and define it as the project baseline. 
  
  Finally, if appropriate for the project type and your project process, you request approval to move the project to the next stage as well as  define a team and channel so that everyone can directly access all aspects of the Projects area from Microsoft Teams.
  

• Collaborating on project support items;
  
  Projects area supports collaboration to ensure your project team can use it to track and manage key items for your project such as issues, risks, decisions, change requests, lessons learned and documents. 
  

• Tracking project progress;
  
  We also recommend that key active projects are tracked weekly by creating project status updates to record the current project health against the appropriate categories: overall project, deliverable, schedule, work, financials, issues, risks, and change requests

• Closing a project; and
  
  We need to ensure that all components of the project: schedule, financials and other support items all reflect that the project is closed and there is no remaining work for the project.

• Project Administration.
  
  There are many other things that only your IQ administrator will be able to do such as deleting project records but you need to be aware of how to disconnect and reconnect support items to another project.

Depending on your organization’s project intake process, the project manager role in Sensei IQ may also be responsible for:

• Creating and maintaining ideas
  
  In the Portfolios area, Ideas provides a central repository for innovations and other potential solutions to business challenges. Capturing and recording ideas supports a strong organizational memory and ensures that good ideas are not forgotten, while also providing the discipline to review and approve which ideas are appropriate to proceed to the next stage in the intake funnel, the proposal.

• Creating and managing proposals
  
  Portfolios area allows you to capture the high-level details for each Proposal. This will include a brief description of the proposal, anticipated dates, key details from the business case, and a timeline of the notes or actions taken during the proposal creation; in other words just enough information to allow for an informed decision on whether a proposal should be approved for additional investment in time and resources as a project.
  
  

Depending your organization’s strategy execution and benefits management process, the project manager role in Sensei IQ may also be responsible for:

• Managing the relationships between strategy and execution
  
  Strategy area provides an efficient way to set organization strategy by defining benefits and associate them with strategic goals as well as portfolios, programs and projects. Benefits can be tracked against specific metrics to measure and validate the realization of the benefit across all levels in Sensei IQ – projects, programs, and portfolios.
  
  

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_{Disclaimer: Some images in the instructional video and text instructions contained herein may appear different from (or not available) in your organization’s Sensei IQ instance due to specific custom configurations and/or continuous solution updates. Ensure that you are already an enabled user in the Sensei.IQ for Project application and check out the What’s New page. Contact your system administrator for any assistance.}