Our glossary offers clear definitions of important terms and concepts within Psoda, ensuring everyone shares a common understanding. It’s a quick reference tool for both newcomers and experienced professionals.
Psoda – Us! Online portfolio, programme and project management software. How do you pronounce it? “Soda”, like the one you drink. Psoda is actually an acronym: Professional Software On Demand Anywhere.
Access Control List – Access Control Lists (ACLs) control the specific access users have in the group/s that this ACL is applied to.
Action – Actions are unscheduled activities that you would like a user to undertake e.g. from a meeting or to mitigate a risk.
Advanced estimates – This allows the project managers to profile the resource demand on a task on a week-by-week basis rather than a fixed percentage allocation between the start and end dates of a task.
Asset – An asset is any item in Psoda that you can create and edit, such as a project, user, programme, task, budget item etc.
Assumption – Record any assumptions you’ve made in the planning of your project. Test your assumptions over time and if any are proven false, make sure to revisit your plans/risks/benefits to make the appropriate updates.
Benefit – Use benefits to record the goals of your organisation, programmes and projects. You can also structure benefits into outputs -> outcomes -> benefits.
Budget item – Budget items are used to record individual line items in your project budgets. Budget items can be mixed or can be restricted to capex/opex/revenue etc.
Budget group – Use budget groups to group together other budget groups and budget line items on your project. Budget groups can be mixed or can be restricted to only capex/opex/revenue/etc.
Change request – Change requests can be used to manage changes on your project e.g. changes to scope and or budget. You can apply a workflow to your change requests to track their lifecycle.
Cost allocation – This option allows you to allocate the cost of your projects on a percentage basis to different business units.
Custom field – Custom fields can be added to create new fields that don’t already exist in Psoda.
Dashboard – Dashboards are a set of widgets (dashlets) that provide a real-time summary of your portfolio, programme or project. You can add/move/modify/hide dashlets to change the layout of your dashboards.
Dashboard (basic) – The basic dashboard view allows you to pick which dashlets you want to see and how wide you want each dashlet to be on the page.
Dashboard (layout) – The layout dashboard view allows you to pick multiple layout styles which contain fixed positions for dashlets of your choice.
Dashlet – Dashlets are the widgets that you add to your dashboard such as charts, tables or custom reports.
Decision – Record any decisions that were made during the life of your project so that you can refer back to those decisions later on and also see who were involved in the decision.
Deleted asset – These are items in Psoda which have been previously deleted. You can restore any deleted items within 14 days of deletion.
Deliverable – This option is used to mark tasks and/or milestones that will produce a deliverable on the project. These deliverables can be viewed on a separate tab on the project view page.
Dependency – Dependencies express a one-way dependency between two programmes, projects, or sub-projects, and the impact one has on the other.
Evaluation – Evaluations are used to score a solution or an RFx response against the requirements on your project.
Exception – Use exceptions to record when your forecast project plan is going to be outside of your allowed tolerances.
Favourites – Favourites can be added to your navigator for quick access to a specific part of Psoda (including the exact tab it is on).
Follow – You can follow a project, risk, action, etc. in Psoda to receive notifications when things get added, updated or even deleted.
Form template – Use form templates to create custom forms or registers that don’t exist in Psoda already. You can also apply workflows to your custom forms. Custom forms have three standard fields for priority, due date and owner. These fields can be hidden using ACLs.
GANTT – A GANTT chart in Psoda visualises all the information, progress, links and more from the schedule (task groups, tasks, milestones).
Group – Security groups are a collection of users with the same access rights. The actual access of the group is defined by the access control list(s) in that group.
Impersonate – Administrators can impersonate other users in their organisation. This means they essentially login as that user on their instance of Psoda, so they can see all the different preferences and settings that particular user has. This is mainly used for debugging purposes.
Indicators- Indicators are used to score an activity for prioritisation or to track the performance of those activities.
Inline editing – Inline editing is where you can click onto a cell or item on the page and edit/change the content directly. The available fields to edit will be represented by a light pencil icon.
Issue – Issues are used to manage known issues on an activity. If the issue was caused by a risk, then you can add the issue from the risk and the form will be pre-filled from the risk details.
Issue maps – These settings allow you to change which options users will have available when they add an issue in Psoda including the consequence drop-down, the list of issue priorities and default text for the issue description, cause and implication fields.
Kanban board – Kanban boards are a view in Psoda where you can see cards representing items categorised in columns by the current workflow state they are in. You can drag and drop cards between columns to change their workflow state.
Lesson – Make sure to record lessons on your project as you learn them rather than waiting until the end of the project. You can also add lessons directly to change requests, issues, risks, sub-projects, programmes and even the organisation.
Material – Add materials to tasks on your project schedule to track the cost of materials and also generate order sheets to get those materials to your sites just in time.
Milestone – Milestones are used to measure how a project is progressing. They are found as a diamond on the GANTT chart.
My stuff – My stuff represents your own user page. This link will take you to the last tab you were on when viewing a user.
Portfolio – Portfolios are used to cherry-pick programmes and projects for dashboards and reporting. Programmes and projects can appear in more than one portfolio. Portfolios can also have sub-portfolios to refine the groupings.
Programme – A programme is normally a group of projects managed in a coordinated way to achieve benefits the individual’s projects cannot. Programmes can also be broken up into sub-programmes.
Project – Projects are fixed pieces of work with a planned start date, duration and end date. Projects may be grouped together into programmes to deliver larger goals or benefits to the organisation.
Purchase order – Use the purchase order to record a specific order to a vendor to purchase services, materials, equipment, etc. Purchase orders can be related to a specific vendor and budget item. Psoda will move the amount of the purchase order to the committed line in the budget item.
Report parameter – Report parameters allow you to filter what appears in the report at run-time.
Report template – Psoda comes with approximately 120 out-of-the-box reports. You can customise these reports or create completely new reports using a report template.
Requirement – Use requirements to capture the scope on your projects. You can also break down high-level requirements into more and more detailed requirements. You can also group your requirements into folders e.g. functional and non-functional requirements.
Resource summary – This tab displays a summary of the resource demands for the project. It is broken into three tables: estimated resource hours by month, estimated resource hours by quarter and actual resource hours by month.
Risk – Risks are used to plan for and monitor things that might happen that will have a significant impact on your project, programme or even across the organisation. Make sure to plan out your mitigation actions to reduce or even completely eliminate the risk.
Risk weighting – This option is used if your organisation prefers to rate project risks on the impact to the project rather than the impact to the organisation. In this case you can set a risk weighting for each project and program and the risk scores will be multiplied with the weighting before rolling the risks up to the next level. For example, a small project weighting might be 0.2 while a large project might have a weighting of 0.9. A critical project might even have a weighting over 1 to increase the visibility of risks from that project.
Risk maps – These settings allow you to customise the risk matrix used in Psoda to match your organisational risk framework including the impact dropdown, probability, overall risk level, categories, strategies and default text when adding new risks.
Role – You can group users into any number of roles. You can then allocate tasks to these roles or you can set up a role as an escalation authority to receive escalated risks, issues, milestones, etc.
Roster – Use this option to set the working and non-working times for scheduling tasks for your organisation. The roster can be set in half-hour intervals.
Schedule – Schedule shows the task groups, tasks and milestones that have been defined for a particular asset.
Skill – You can add employee and contractor skills that your organisation care about and want to measure people and tasks against. Skills can be either technical or soft skills. Skills can be grouped using the group name or selecting an existing group from the dropdown.
Sub-project – Sub-projects are like normal projects, but with less features. They are always contained within a project or sub-project and can be nested any number of times.
Summary area – This is the area underneath the asset title on most pages. This are contains summary information about the asset and can be expanded/collapsed by toggling the button ‘summary’.
Task – Tasks are used to schedule activities within your project. Tasks can have a fixed start/end date or can be automatically calculated based on the links with other tasks/milestones.
Task group – Task groups provide a way of grouping tasks, milestones and other task groups together into a work breakdown structure.
Template (asset) – A template asset is an asset that you want to use a template when adding new asset of that type. This can be set by ticking the ‘is template’ checkbox in the add or edit popup of an asset. Then when you go to add another asset of this type, you should see the option to select the template. A common example is a template user which organisations select when they need to add a new user.
Timesheet – Timesheets are where you can keep track of time spent on different tasks for a particular week. You can submit your timesheets to your manager for approval.
Timesheet task – Timesheet tasks are used to record time on a timesheet and can be related to project tasks, BAU tasks, organisational leave tasks or even ad-hoc tasks.
Traceability matrix – The matrix can be sued to visualise the relationships between changes, requirements, test cases and test steps on your projects so that you can analyse the impacts of changes and ensure that you have covered your requirements with sufficient test cases.
Transaction – Transactions are used for moving money between budget items, this allows you to keep track of where your money is going. Transactions are locked behind approval, so the money doesn’t move until you say so.
Whiteboard – Use our electronic whiteboards to share your ideas virtually across multiple locations. Everybody can draw on the board at the same time and Psoda automatically saves the sequence of the whiteboard so you can view it again later on.
Workflow – Workflows can be applied to most things in Psoda such as projects, tasks, risks and attachments. Workflows can include rules around moving from one state to another and also automation steps e.g. to escalate a risk after 3 weeks or to generate a report and send an email.
Workflow action – Workflow actions provide the ability to automate what happens when something is transitioned into a state. These actions can collect data from the database, analyse the data and then respond in the required way without human intervention.