AI_Project_Management

Getting Started

This walkthrough takes you all the way through one project's lifecycle in the AIPM web app: sign in, create a project, set your stakeholders, capture requirements and deliverables, request and grant an evidence-based sign-off, and finally close the project. Every step names the real screen and URL you will use.

Throughout, the links in angle brackets are the actual routes in the running app — e.g. /inbox is the page you reach by clicking Inbox in the navigation, or by visiting http://<host>/inbox directly. The Help link in the dashboard navigation always brings you back to this library.

Step 1 — Log in

Open the app and go to /login. Enter the identity and password your administrator issued you, and submit. A signed session cookie is set, and every action you take from now on is recorded against your identity in the tamper-evident audit log.

First time in, or want to rotate your password? Use /my/password (the Change password nav link) to set a new one. There is no separate self-registration — identities are provisioned for you.

Step 2 — Create a project (you become its sponsor)

Go to New project (/new/project) and fill in the project's name and details. When you create a project this way, AIPM makes you its accountable sponsor — the role that later authorizes closing the project.

Your projects are always listed under My Projects (/my/projects). Open one to reach its dashboard, which shows the project's status and work-package counts at a glance.

Step 3 — Set stakeholders

Record who has a stake in the project — the sponsor, approvers, contributors, and anyone who must be kept informed. The AI project manager drafts the register; you, the sponsor, review, edit, and approve it on the Stakeholders page (/project/<id>/stakeholders, linked from the dashboard). Each stakeholder's Mitchell salience class is derived from the power/legitimacy/urgency attributes you tick. The register is an initiating-phase artifact: it is bundled into the initiating phase gate, so approving that gate (Step 6) is also the stakeholder sign-off. A well-formed register is what lets AIPM route sign-off requests to the right approver and enforce separation of duties later. See the Stakeholder register guidance for what belongs here and why.

Step 3a — Phase-gate sign-offs

Every project runs through the five PMBOK phases — initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, closing — and each has a gate. From the dashboard, click Phases & sign-offs (/project/<id>/phases) to see each phase's status and open its artifact bundle (/phase/<phase-id>). As the sponsor you Submit for sign-off, which routes you to the usual three-role sign-off decision; approving the gate marks the phase signed off and opens the next one. The project cannot advance out of a phase until its gate is signed off — the initiating gate covers the stakeholder register.

Step 4 — Enter requirements and deliverables

Capture what the project must achieve and what it will produce:

Acceptance criteria are not optional paperwork — they become the yardstick the checker and approver measure the evidence against in the next step.

Step 5 — Request a sign-off

When a deliverable is ready, request an evidence-based sign-off with New sign-off (/new/signoff). AIPM uses a three-role model, and the three roles must be three different people (or agents):

RoleDoes
MakerSubmits the evidence of what was built or done.
CheckerReviews that evidence and records a pass or fail. The maker may not check their own work.
ApproverReads the evidence package and signs off — but only when the checker has passed.

The full mechanics are in Approving with Evidence.

Step 6 — Review the evidence and approve (or reject)

When a decision is waiting for you, it appears in your Inbox (/inbox) under “Awaiting your decision”. Open the item to reach its sign-off page at /approvals/<id>.

There you will see the evidence package: the acceptance criteria, the maker's submitted evidence, the checker's review, and a status badge (PASS in green, or NOT PASSED in red). Read the acceptance criteria first, confirm the maker's evidence satisfies them and the checker's review is sound, then choose Approve, Reject, or Withdraw and enter a rationale (required for every decision).

Approve is only available when the checker has passed — this is a server guard, not a hint. A failed or missing check still lets you reject or send the item back.

Step 7 — Close the project

Once the work is accepted and the project is complete, the accountable sponsor closes it. On the project dashboard, the sponsor sees a Close Project action that leads to the confirm form at /project/close. Confirm there to close the project.

A closed project is marked read-only — the dashboard shows a prominent CLOSED banner and further edits are refused, preserving the record of what was delivered and approved. Only the sponsor of an open project sees the Close action; it never appears to anyone who cannot use it.

Where to go next