Website Tutorial: Managing Deliverables for a Lab Workspace

Last revision: May 6, 2011 by Thomas Houfek
Contact us with any comments, suggestions, or corrections for this tutorial.

Scope of this tutorial
Viewing your Lab Workspace's Deliverables
Associating Resources with Deliverables
Closing Deliverables
Deliverables Met, Re-opened, and Terminated

Scope of this tutorial

This tutorial is only relevant to users who participate in BCBC 3.0 as members of Lab Workspaces. Other users may disregard it.

Deliverables are tangible or intangible items that are expected to be produced as a result of a BCBC-funded research project. They are typically agreed upon at the outset of the project, and assigned to one of the project participants.

The tutorial explains how to view the Deliverables assigned to your Lab Workspace, how to associate Lab Resources with these Deliverables; and how to close them when your lab's Principal Investigator believes they are met.

Viewing your Lab Workspace's Deliverables

When you navigate to your Lab Workspace you arrive first at the Overview page, the main panel of which is shown in Figure A:

Figure A.

A very brief report of your lab's Deliverables is displayed among the statistics in the Workspace Overview box. In the (fictional) situation depicted by the screenshot, the (fictional) Houfek Lab has two assigned Deliverables, both of which are Open. None are Closed or Met. Let us go ahead and define what these states mean:

Open -- The Deliverable is still in progress: your lab has yet to fully annotate Resources that are to be associated with the Deliverable.
Closed -- Your laboratory has associated all appropriate Resources with the Deliverable and has indicated that they consider the Deliverable as having been met.
Met -- Reviewers have confirmed that the Deliverable is met. (After reviewing the associated Resources and possibly other related material.)

(In addition, a Deliverable may be Terminated, if it is agreed that the Deliverable is no longer worth pursuing, or if another Deliverable has been created to replace it.)

Observe that the numbers in the mini-report in the Workspace Overview are hyperlinked. These links take you to the appropriate tabs of your Lab workspace's Project Deliverable page. For example, to see detailed list of the Open Deliverables assigned to your Laboratory, click the number to the left of (Open). Also, you can click the Project Deliverables link in the Laboratory Workspace Menu (not shown in the screenshot, this is displayed on the right side of every page in the Laboratory Workspace). This link too will always take you to the Open tab of the Project Deliverable page, shown in Figure B:

Figure B.

In passing, let us point out that you can filter this list using the drop-down menus labelled Project Type, Project, and Year.

The active tab is labelled Open, and contains a list of all the Deliverables that are assigned to your Lab Workspace that are still in the Open state. To view Deliverables that are Closed, Met, or Terminated, click on the appropriate tab.

To view a Deliverable in detail, click its Description. In our example, if we clicked on "Create protocol for creating protocols", we would see the Deliverable Detail View shown in Figure C:

Figure C.

At the top of this view is a "cookie crumb" navigation tool that takes you back to the appropriate tab of the Project Deliverables page, or to the default (Open) tab, or to the Overview page of your Lab Workspace.

Below the cookie crumb is the Deliverable summary: the same information you saw in the list view.

Observe the two buttons: and . These buttons invoke forms used to manage the Deliverable. If you click you will see something analogous to Figure D:

Figure D.

Associating Resources with Deliverables

In Figure D no Resources have yet been associated with the Deliverable. However, our fictional Houfek Lab has one Resource (the "Creating Protocols Protocol") which may be associated. To do so, we would click the icon next to the Resource. This transfers the Resource from the Unassociated "bucket" to the Associated "bucket", as shown in Figure E:

Figure E.

You can associate a Resource with a Deliverable in this way even if annotation of the Resource is not complete. In other words, if you like you can stub out Resources and associate them with Deliverables long before you are ready to close the Deliverable.

Deliverables may also be associated with Resources on the Lab Resource page of the Lab Workspace. To do this, click on the under the Deliverables column for the appropriate Resource. The button will be labelled with the number of Deliverables already associated with the Resource. In the example shown in Figure F, one deliverable is associated already:

Figure F.

Clicking the will raise a popup similar to the one shown in Figure G. The popup contains a checklist of all your laboratory's Open Deliverables. If this Resource has already been associated with a Deliverable, the Deliverable will be checked.

So, here you can associate or unassociate a Deliverable with a Resource by checking and unchecking the Deliverables in the list. This is just another way of accomplishing the same task we can perform using the the Deliverable Detail view -- we are just coming at it from the context of the Resource instead of the Deliverable.

Figure G.

Closing Deliverables

When you are ready to close the Deliverable, you return to the Deliverable Detail view and click the button. This invokes a form like the one shown in Figure H:

Figure H.

All there is to do here is to enter a message for the reviewers to see when they review the Deliverable. The message is optional. The Deliverable will be closed when you hit , and you will be returned to the list view. The Deliverable will no longer appear in the Open tab. Instead, it will now reside in the Closed tab. If we click on it to return to the Deliverable Detail page, we see what is shown in Figure I:

Figure I.

We no longer see the , because we have already closed the deliverable. However, we can still . This is provided in case we forgot to associate a Resource earlier, and have been asked to do so by a reviewer. At this point, however, you will not be able to unassociate Resources already associated with the Deliverable.

If you made a mistake in associating a Resource to a Deliverable that has since been closed, or if you have any other difficulties managing Deliverables, please contact us for assistance.

Deliverables Met, Re-opened, and Terminated

At some time after you close a Deliverable, reviewers will review the Deliverable and your associated Resources. They may also communicate with your Principal Investigator about the Deliverable. If they agree that the Deliverable has been satisfied, they will transition it to the Met state. And that Deliverable is done! You may still view it: it will be filed away under the Met tab of your Lab Workspace's Project Deliverables page.

If the reviewers think something about a closed Deliverable is incomplete or unsatisfactory, they may re-open it. In this case it will again appear in the Open tab of your Lab Workspace's Project Deliverables page. The reviewer should have made a comment indicating why the Deliverable was re-opened: this should be visible in the History on the Deliverable Detail page.