Parallax

Parallax is a tool that allows us to connect Harvest time entries (actual hours spent), project budgets, the sales pipeline, and a planning view for projects. This tool is very robust and may contain a lot of information. But the good news is: Parallax has great filter options for things like Projects, Assignments, and Pipelines. As a developer, you will mostly be working in the Assignments View, which is where work planning will be allocated.

Quick Start Guide

1. Got to Parallax’s Assignment View: https://app.getparallax.com/assignments
2. Create a filter to narrow down the view of data
3. Go to People view
4. Find yourself -> expand your view by clicking on the triangle
5. Get to work 😎

The Assignment View

The Assignment View shows planning on either a project or person level. When you first open Assignments from the left hand menu, it will be a bit overwhelming.¹

Assignments

Table of Contents

• Denominator & View Settings
• People vs. Project Views
• Createing a Filter
• Viewing Assignments
• Editing an Assignment
• Parallax <> Slack Integration
• Parallax Maslow AI Beta

Denominator & View Settings

In the bottom right corner of the Assingments View page, there are a number of denominator and view options: Actual Hours, Week, Day, Data, etc.

Currently, our approach is to plan work on a weekly basis, in actual hours.This should be the defualt, but just in case it is not, here are the settings for the bottom right corner menu:

• Denominator = Actual Hours
• View = Week
• Data = Hours

Also on the bottom menu are quick-jump options that will take you to the start of your filer view, or today. These are useful when you are viewing a large chunk of time.

People vs. Project Views

In the Assignment View, there is the option to view planned work by People or Projects.

Creating a Filter

Filters are personal to your instance of Parallax. This allows for decluttering or re-cluttering a view based on your personal preference.

1. Go to Parallax: https://app.getparallax.com/active
2. Select Assignments from the left-hand menu
3. Ensure that you are on the People view (top left, below Assignments View header)
4. At the top left there is a triangle hamburger menu for filtering -> this will open a new side menu on the right side of the screen
5. Set the Timeframe as: ‘Last 0 weeks & next 4 weeks’
6. Under Filter by People, set the Departments filter to only show Dev Contractor and Developer.
7. Under Filter by Project Details, set the Status filter to show All Statuses
   • All Statuses will show pre-sale projects, sold projects, and completed projects.
   • If All Statuses is too messy, try All Active Statuses instead!
8. At the bottom of the right pane, you have the option to Save this filter and then name it

Tip: If you only want to see your own assignments, all you have to do is complete steps 1 - 7, then enter your name in the search bar near the bottom of the filter panel before saving!

Viewing Assingments

Now that you’ve created a filter to narrow down what is shown in the People view, it will be much easier to see where hours are allocated for the week.

1. Find your name on the left panel
2. Open the drawer (triangle menu next to your name)
3. The projects will be listed on the left under your name

Notes

• Hours are listed in hours-per-week assigned (bold number)
• Actual hours are listed below planned hours (not-bold number)
• Red numbers indicate actual hours over planned

For more information about the box colors, numbers, and symbols: There is a Key at the bottom left corner of the Assignments View page

Editing an Assignment

To edit a planned assignment:

1. Go to the Assingments View
2. In the bottom center of the screen will be an Edit toggle
3. Confirm that you want to edit
4. Open the drawer for the person you’d like to edit
5. Click into the box you’d like to edit and change the number

Notes

• It is not possible to edit Actual hours in Parallax, these are pulled in from Harvest automatically. If you change them in Harvest, they will update. (Actual hours are the smaller number under the bold number)
• You can edit many rows in a horizontal line by clicking into a box with a number in it and dragging left or right!

Parallax <> Slack Integration

Parallax has a slack integration that is enabled on the PA slack account!

1. Go to your personal channel (DM yourself)
2. enter /parallax + an argument
   • Today
   • Tomorrow
   • Next Week

This will return a list of all your planned projects for that time period, based on what is in the Assignments View in Parallax. ²

If you get stuck, you can also enter /parallax help to get a brief reminder of the options.

Parallax Maslow AI Beta

Parallax has an AI now! It is currently in Beta and is very limited.

Maslow AI Can:

1. Provide a summary of hours for individual projects
2. Provide a summary of your weekly scheduled time
3. Help you request an adjustment to hours in Parallax
   • Increase hours on a project resource
   • Decrease hours on a project resource

Engineer Guide

How to get started

In the beta period, Maslow lives on a different URL than the traditional Parallax. https://maslow.getparallax.com/proassist-ic/. As an engineer, you are an IC, or an Individual Contributor. There is also a PM view with admin permissions.

1. Go to Proassist-IC

2. Login with your google account

3. Select the Planet Argon organization

4. A chat window will open (This is VERY SLOW)

5. Input your command:

   • e.g.: “Give me a summary of my hours this week for all projects”
   • e.g.: “I need to add 3 hours to the WALK project”
   • e.g.: “I overestimated WALK project work, we can remove 2 hours from the resource”

6. Maslow will ask for a reason for this request - this can be plain language (e.g. “Need more time to finish WALK-123 automated testing”)

   • Note: The tool will allow you to go over your alloted budget time (meaning: you can request 100 hrs in one week if you want). This will be flagged in your request to the PM.

7. Important: You must confirm your request. It is very easy to miss this prompt as it is plain text in the chat window!

   

8. Once you confirm: Maslow will submit this request to the PM for approval

9. If the request is approved, the time will be adjusted on Parallax automatically.

Here is a real example:

What the Beta CANNOT do

A lot! But it’s growing. Right now the Beta is focused on one core functionality: can the tool add or remove resources based on plain language input in a constructive and safe way.

So the tool does not have access to things like: financial data for projects to check if the budget is overspent, direct harvest entries, or many other project fields. As an engineer in the tool, this is mostly okay for the beta - as a PM it is a real pain.

The tool is very slow. They know this. This tool does not have notifications. So you will need to manually check submitions and requests.

In the future the Parallax team is looking to expand this tool and add new features.

How to Submit feedback on the beta

Please submit any feedback, issues, or ideas about the beta test to Michael Kurt. He is currently tasked with taking a weekly survey on our test during the beta period.

PM Guide to Maslow AI

As a PM, you will have a few more things to do in Maslow than the IC permission set. Importantly: You have the permission to actually approve / reject and change hours live in parallax through the AI agent. Let’s go through it.

PM version: https://maslow.getparallax.com/proassist-pm/

Important Note: You will need to be the Project Owner on the Parallax project to approve / reject or change the allocations.

Reviewing Engineer Requests

When you first log in to the Proassist-pm version of the agent, you should recieve a statement about your open requests, or a list of actions that you are able to complete.

To review a request

• Use plain language to approve or deny specific requests.
• You should be able to approve all reviewed requests.
• During this process, you should be able to ask Maslow for a summary of the hours for a project.

At the end of a process, you should get a summary of the actions taken when approving / denying a request. If you don’t, you can ask for it in the chat window.

Let’s walk through a full flow

1. In the IC agent, an Engineer submits a request to change hours on a project - let’s say APGT in this example.
2. They add a reason to their request, and confirm it.
3. As a PM, when you login, you should be prompted to review open requests. You do that.
4. APGT is listed, and the reason makes sense!
5. You should be able to ask Maslow what the current week resources look like for APGT
6. Then, everything is looking good, you can either request another change or execute the approval to change the APGT hours based on the request
7. It confirms the action
8. And delivers a summary of actions taken
9. The hours automatically change in the shaper, which in the beta is a different URL and window. You will have to manually check this.
   • or, ask the agent for a new summary of hours for the week in the APGT project.

Approval example:

In Parallax Assignment View - these hours were added:

Notes

• The tool is very limited and slow in Beta - mainly it will only do this hours function.
• The tool will highlight burnout in the hours requests - meaning: it will tell you that X-Engineer has requested 8 hours for Y-project, which puts them at 50 hours for the week.
• The tool does not have access to financial data.
• The tool does not have notifications - so you will need to check this manually.

Notes

Footnotes

1. For more information about the Assignments View, check out the Parallax Knowledge Base Article ↩

2. More info on Parallax and Slack Integration: Using the Parallax Bot - Slack ↩