This section allows you to configure and define the periods used on pages with timelines - Financial Details, Resource
Details, Benefits Plan. You can either set this to Calendar Months (starting on the 1st of the month) or Custom Periods.
For Custom Periods, you define the number of weeks in each of the 12 periods. Each period must contain an integer. The total weeks in a year must sum to 52 or 53.
All periods must start on a Monday so PM3 automatically organises that using the nearest Monday.
You can also edit the format that the Year is displayed in. The Display format for Year shows how you wish to display the year in those pages and reports which contain periods. So example formats might be 2019 or FY2018-19.
This format is displayed in the Preview box.
When the end of the period is reached, multiple statistics relating to Delivery Status across Milestone, Action, Risk and Issue pages, and Benefit and Financial FY estimates are committed to history across plans and portfolios.
Technical Note on Period Definition Year Tag:
There is a baseline PeriodYear defined by field DisplayOrder=0. (There are DisplayOrders less than and greater than 0. Each client may have a different baseline PeriodYear, based on when their database was first commissioned).
The StartDate of the baseline PeriodYear is calculated from the nearest (before or after) Monday to the 1st of First Month in Year as selected in the Admin>General. From there, all periods and years are calculated forwards and backwards using the defined custom period weeks sequence, to ensure that each year is totally consecutive i.e. the end of one year is 1 day before the start of the next year and at the same time, has the correct period weeks sequence. The baseline year may be found and updated via SQL.
When you update the Period Definition, the YearTag is automatically re-generated for all. It is possible for consecutive Custom PeriodYears to have StartDates in the same calendar year e.g. 2007-01-01, 2007-12-31.
The YearTag is generated from the StartDate for each year. More precisely, PM3 uses the Year appearing in a date, 2 weeks after the PeriodYear StartDate to avoid duplicate YearTags in cases like the above, where the 2 consecutive years have StartDates in the same calendar year.