Building Customer View

Suppose you run a project for a specific customer and you would like to share a roadmap of the project with specific milestones and their progress. You do not want to expose all details of the project.

What is the best way to do this?

First of all, add your customer to your organization as an  External User. This will allow him to enter your organization with the credentials sent to him in the Welcome email and see the information that was shared with him.

There are 2 ways to share specific information with your customer:

Option 1

Just assign your customer as a reviewer to the specific milestones (or any other work item) of your project. Your customer will be able to see only these work items and their sub-items.

Option 2

In many cases you would like to reserve time buffers for specific work items you are sharing with the customer.  To do so, you will need to create new milestones that “represent” the actual milestones status, but might have slightly different dates:

• In your Project create a sub project dedicated for a customer view.
• Assign your customer to the customer view project, either as reviewer or as a manager, depending on whether you would like to grant him with write access to this project (e.g.: create sub-tasks under the milestones)
• Create the key milestones that represent specific milestones of your Project that you would like to share with the customer.  Define the start and/or due dates of these milestones that will be exposed to your customer, assuming that dates of the internal milestones can be “tighter”.
• Create progress impact links between milestones of the customer view project and corresponding milestones in your Project.

 With this setup, progress made in the corresponding activities of your internal Project will be reflected in the customer view subproject.

Note:

The same approach can be taken in order to share specific data on the project with any external stakeholder.