Highlights

• Tabular Cost Data Entry
• Sequential Approval Workflows
• Summary Tasks and Automatic Progress Calculation is built into Schedule Mechanism
• Benefit Flipping Behaviour is Removed
• Design and Usability Improvements
• System Settings Made Configurable
• Issues Resolved

 

Tabular Cost Data Entry

Any data, when read in conjunction with contextual information makes more sense and becomes more useful. This is what a tabular format helps you achieve. Amplify's Cost Ledger view, brings time-phased cost data to one location from where you can view and manage it. It works likes an excel sheet, you just need to type in values and press enter key to submit data. You also have the option to copy data from excel sheet and paste it directly into this table.

You can use the new Cost Ledger interface to:

• View time-phased cost data of all cost categories within your project
• Use filters and sorting to organize the data in myriad ways and save each type of data layout as a new view
• Type data into the cells or copy values from an excel sheet and back. No concept of blank cells. All cells default to zero.
• Expand or minimise the interface so that the interface fills into the total screen space.

Please note that we have not made any modifications to the underlying cost feature design. For instance, if you have enabled the setting, Replace Budget with Actual Values, you can expect the budget data entry cell filled with values that you typed into the Actuals area.

   

Sequential Approval Workflows

New and improved workflow engine with more levels of approval, choice of a single or unanimous vote or self approval, capability to define more than one workflow for a stage gate process.This enhanced workflow engine guarantees to streamline your processes much effectively. Things you can accomplish with this new design.

1. Configure different approval workflows for each gate in a Stage Gate process.
2. Create workflows with multiple layers of approvals. An approval in one layer kicks it up to the next while a rejection rejects the whole approval.
3. Define three types of approvals- 
   • self-approval, where the approval response record is automatically created to for the user that submitted the approval and for it to be automatically approved all in the one go. 
   • single approval , where you can specify a role that can approve. Any team member with the designated role can be the approver. 
   • unanimous approval, where all users of the designated role have to approve for the workflow to advance.

Another change that you'd notice is two tabs featured on the New Classification form. Stage gate process is featured as a separate tab on the initiative classification creation form. This is only a visual enhancement.

Summary Tasks and Automatic Progress Calculation is built into Schedule Mechanism

Two optional settings that operate along with Enable Schedule - Enable Summary Tasks and Automatic Progress on Summary Tasks have been removed from Classification settings and incorporated into the Enable Schedule setting so that when you select 'Local' in the Enable Schedule drop-down, the above settings are automatically enabled for you.

In other words, with Amplify version 19.9, selecting Local Schedule view would mean that every time you create a task, the parent task is converted to a summary task, and that task displays the average progress of all child items.   

You no longer have the option to create tasks that is not attached to a summary bar.

If you are an existing user, upon upgrading to version 19.9, all existing tasks with subtasks will be moved under summary tasks and the progress for these summary tasks will be automatically calculated.

 

Benefit Flipping Behaviour is Removed

Previously, when Plan series had negative values, the resultant benefit graph displayed a negative plotting because, the internal logic summed up all planned values, and if this was negative all individual points were multiplied by -1. This behaviour has been removed and is replaced with a straightforward nature of graph plotting where the benefits realisation graph does not show a flipped graph unless you have negative plan values.

In the case of disbenefits, when you have negative values, you can see a positive graph, else a flipped one.

Design and Usability Improvements

• Ability to open Amplify's Custom Power BI Reports in full-screen mode

• Delinked the capability to integrate schedules from Principal Toolbox 

• Rebuilt Benefit Properties with React

• Rebuilt Resource Capacities table using ag-Grid 

System Settings Made Configurable

Few key system settings, which were previously configurable only by a superuser, have been exposed to administrator users to make the most of. 

As an administrator, you can now define and modify:

• Organisation name
• Allowed document formats
• Amplify Help Url, and
• User locale

You also have the ability to upload a logo image for Amplify interface and define password policy settings.

A new setting that will allow you to control the device session timeout. This will default to 30 minutes.

The Benefit Classification settings will now show the Amplify Index Comparison Series.

This means that now you can define Amplify Index calculation strategy at the classification level. You can select either Forecast or Baseline as the series with which benefit plan is to be compared to determine the Amplify Index.

Return on Investment Series selection drop-down is moved to the initiative classification settings interface.

You can now select either Forecast or Plan series as the values used in calculating ROI for every initiative type.

 

Issues Resolved 

Issue key	Summary
AMP-8012	Drawing a correct relationship between the schedule item and the benefit will automatically set the benefit milestone flag.
AMP-1718	Dates of parent tasks will be the same on the Gantt chart and Table view.