Structuring the system to work for us

Hello,

Been reading this system heavily for the past few weeks, and we're currently moving off a highly customised version of Mantis.

So far, the product looks like what we need, but I have some questions about translating our working practices into this product. Apologies for what probably seems like a specification (we're a software house).

We're obviously going from a structure in Mantis which is

Project Name (Client)
> Ticket Category
>> Tickets

To ORIA which uses the model

Customers (Clients)

Project Name (Linked to Customer)
> Sub Project
>> Activity
>>> Tickets
> Activity
>> Tickets

We normally run timers against tickets / categories in the current system, but these don't feed into a PM framework (which is our intention for the move).

For the initial migration, I'm proposing the following model:

Project Name == Mantis.Client
> Activity == Mantis.Category
>> Ticket == Mantis.Ticket in Mantis.Category


My questions with this model:

1. I have the understanding, that we cannot put timers against the Activities. As such how do we account for the work assigned to an activity, which would be made up from the tickets in the activity collectively?

E.G. Phase 1 (Activity) is allocated 30 hours, we have 40 tickets within this Phase 1 (Activity) and people are running timers against the tickets. I would expect for this time logging to feed upwards into the parent activity to give measures on EST vs ACTUALS?

2. For global Activities such as Management, would you recommend creating tickets within the Phase 1 (Activity) object, relating to Management and Sales for example?

3. Linked with the above point,are real work allocations intended for users to enter their hours worked per activity/ticket within the activity - Or is the intention for these to be populated with timer times (from users working on tickets).


The intended goal of moving from Mantis


1. Have a proper project planning process in place, with projects /phases and subsequent tickets within them

2. Be able to report on % completion on project stages at any point, as a collection of tickets completed / left within them

3. Gain an overview of all projects from a programme level, to give development teams weekly focus and goals - I.e. Project X is 96% completed, and makes more financial sense to work on it than Project Y at 42%.

Very much appreciate the replies babynus.

I have two further questions if possible:

- On importing all of the tickets, for some reason all tickets display as ... until opened and saved in ProjectORRIA - Once saved it will then show in the ticket view correctly. (Screenshot attached)

- How do we signify carriage returns for the description imports, we've used various escape chars to no effect so far