Here’s a few things you might like to know as you get started:

What’s the relationship between my FWV user account, my organisation and my projects? Why can’t I edit projects sometimes?

For security purposes, users can only edit projects for the organisation they selected when first creating an account.  For example if you signed up for an account under “Company NZ” but all of the projects in your company are linked to the organisation “Company.inc”, you won’t be able to edit those projects.  If you need your organisation changed, or you need a project changing to a new organisation, please contact [email protected] and we’ll swap things over for you.

If you are a contractor working on behalf of another organisation and you want to add or edit projects for them, you will need to either:

• sign up for an account and select the organisation’s name as your organisation.  For security purposes, we will need approval from someone in that organisation for this to happen
• if the project exists in the system already, we can move a project from one organisation to another – but if the project data is coming from a data source, this will break that connection (see the next section below)

To edit a project, you’ll need to have signed up for ‘project planner’ access – this gives you the ability to add and edit projects for your organisation.  If you’ve signed up for the wrong type of access, that’s OK – just contact Support and we’ll change it for you.

BUT – it’s important to note that different organisations supply data in different ways, and sometimes you shouldn’t be editing your projects in the Forward Works Viewer – which leads us nicely onto…

How does project data get into the Forward Works Viewer, and how do I keep it up to date? 

As mentioned above, different organisations supply data differently.  Some organisations add it directly into the Forward Works Viewer using the ‘add new project’ button, some organisations have their projects in another system and the FWV extracts the data directly from that system, and some organisations will put together a spreadsheet of all their projects and supply it with shape files which we bulk upload on a regular basis.   Our job is to sort through the data (which is provided in lots of different formats with different fields) and publish it in the FWV as one standard format. 

Where data is provided by an organisation and bulk uploaded or extracted from their system of record, it’s important that projects ARE NOT edited in the Forward Works Viewer, and are instead edited in the source data record.  This is because it’s easier to keep one system updated rather than two, and also because there’s the risk that next time the data is supplied to us, it may overwrite any changes to the project you made in the FWV – so all your hard work is undone.  

If you’re not sure how your project data gets into the FWV, and how you should be updating it, please drop us an email and we can tell you.  Also, if you currently manually add projects to the system but would like to look into a more automated process, just let us know and we can explore options.

What does the project state mean, where it says ‘In Progress’ or ‘Planned’? My project has finished, but it’s still saying ‘In Progress’?

The project state is a system generated state, based on the project start and end dates that have been provided.  Anything ‘planned’ means that the start date is in the future (relative to today’s date), and shows up on the map with no coloured outline.  Anything ‘in progress’ means that according to the project start and end date, the project is currently happening and shows up on the map with a black outline.  A project which goes beyond its end date will remain on the FWV map for up to 14 days, then it will drop off the map – so it’s important to keep the start and end dates up-to-date.  The search function will also search for completed projects, so if you can no longer find the project on the map, you can find it by searching for it, and editing it that way if you need to change the date to make it show on the map.

Any project that has gone 14 days beyond its end date will no longer be found on the map, but will be available in the completed projects layer. To view this layer, click on the layers menu and select ‘completed projects’.  You can also use the search for completed projects – just select ‘include completed projects’ at the bottom of the search panel when you’re doing your project search.