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User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
Projects
A project organizes all the information that is related to develop and run one or more related marketing initiatives. Projects contain general information, resources, and attachments for the marketing initiative. Projects also typically organize the people who work on the marketing initiative, including who completes which tasks, and the timeline to complete the tasks. Projects can also include budget information. Monitoring features ensure that everyone knows whether the project is completed on time.
Projects and project requests
Your permission settings determine whether you create projects or project requests. If you do not have permission to create projects, you submit a project request to someone who has the necessary permissions.
Project health
In addition to the statuses that indicate the lifecycle stage of a project, Unica Plan calculates a health status for projects.

User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Introduction
  Unica Plan is a tool for enterprise planning, collaboration, and workflow that provides a complete solution for the needs of marketers. You can use Unica Plan to get a comprehensive and holistic view of all marketing projects across your company.
- Common tasks
- Plans
  Plans capture the objectives of a business unit or geographic area for a specific timeframe, such as a year or a quarter. A plan is the container for your marketing programs and projects.
- Programs
  Programs are the child-objects of Plans. Programs can contain multiple projects to organize work for your organization.
- Projects
  A project organizes all the information that is related to develop and run one or more related marketing initiatives. Projects contain general information, resources, and attachments for the marketing initiative. Projects also typically organize the people who work on the marketing initiative, including who completes which tasks, and the timeline to complete the tasks. Projects can also include budget information. Monitoring features ensure that everyone knows whether the project is completed on time.
  - Projects and project requests
    Your permission settings determine whether you create projects or project requests. If you do not have permission to create projects, you submit a project request to someone who has the necessary permissions.
    - Project reconciliation
      Typically, projects use the same statuses as other business objects in Unica Plan. However, projects can also be in a temporary state, In Reconciliation. You apply this status while you reactivate a completed or canceled project, update project information, then change the state back to completed or canceled. For example, the owner of a project can make private changes to a canceled project.
    - Project request statuses
      Project requests have a different set of statuses from other marketing objects: draft, submitted, returned, and accepted.
    - Project health
      In addition to the statuses that indicate the lifecycle stage of a project, Unica Plan calculates a health status for projects.
  - Project views
    Unica Plan organizes projects and project requests in views.
  - Unica Campaign projects in an integrated system
    If your Unica Plan system is integrated with Unica Campaign, you can create campaign projects.
  - Creating projects
    You can create a single project from a project template. Your administrator sets up and maintains project templates. You can also create projects by copying a project, making up to 99 clones of a project, or responding to a project request.
  - Cloning projects
    To create multiple similar projects from a single existing project, you clone the project. You specify how many projects to create, and select fields you want to edit before the new projects are saved. You can clone a project when it is in any status.
  - Starting projects
    You start a project by changing the status. Select the transition Start Project.
  - Project attachments tab
    The Project Attachments tab organizes attachments to the project. The tab contains two sections: one for attachments for the project as a whole and one for attachments to individual tasks in the project.
  - Project requests
    If you do not have the security permissions to create a project, you create a project request. A project request is similar to a work order or creative brief. It represents a request for someone else to do work according to the specifications supplied by the requester.
  - Copying projects
    To create a project that is similar to an existing one, you can copy that existing project. You can make the copy when the project is in any state. You can then edit the copied project as needed. This functionality provides you a high flexibility with many options.
  - Team projects and requests
    Users can submit requests to a team, rather than an individual. Such requests are called team requests.
  - Navigating from projects to programs
    You can link a project to a program. Programs help you organize projects in logical groups. After you link a project to a program, you can go to the program from within that project.
  - Linked projects
    Marketing projects often involve people from outside the marketing department, making it difficult to track everything with a single, comprehensive project. You can use multiple linked projects or subprojects to manage these tasks.
  - Linking a Journey to Projects
    You can link a Journey to a project. The conditions for linking a Journey to a project are as follows:
  - Assigning work
    After a project exists, users can assign work to people or teams.
  - Reconciling projects
    After you complete or cancel a project, you can edit certain portions of the project by placing it into a temporary state, In Reconciliation.
  - Deleting projects
    When you delete a project, Unica Plan checks to see whether you linked the project to a program. If you did, you cannot delete the project until you remove it from the program.
  - Project and request deactivation
    After your organization uses Unica Plan for some time, the user interface can become cluttered with out-dated or unwanted projects and requests. You can deactivate projects and requests to reduce clutter and simplify searches.
- Workflows
  To help you complete different workflow-related efforts, the Workflow tab offers different view modes and an edit mode.
- Approvals
  An approval process streamlines the process of having your work reviewed and approved. Multiple users can review work in parallel or in an order that represents your business processes.
- People and teams
  In Unica Plan, you assign work to teams or individual users.
- Calendar
  Historically, organizations produced paper-based calendars and updated them with the latest information. The calendar feature provides marketing groups with electronic means to view and update calendar data.
- Grids
  A grid is a spreadsheet-like presentation of data. Grids allow Unica Plan users to store all campaign- and project-related data within the project.
- Marketing objects
  A marketing object is any work product a team develops and reuses in the course of its marketing activities. Marketing objects can represent physical items (such as a letter or banner ad) or a business component (such as a credit card offer, a target segment definition, or a rewards program definition).
- Assets and asset libraries
  Unica Plan provides centralized management, secure storage, and web-based access for digital assets.
- Budgets
  In Unica Plan, a budget coordinates expenses of plans, programs, and projects. After you establish the plan budget, you can fund linked programs, and ultimately projects, from it. Unica Plan tracks budgets of child programs and projects in the form of allocations, forecasted or committed spending, and actual expenses.
- Invoices
  In Unica Plan, you can view all changes that were made to an invoice, including the time and date of the changes and the type of changes made.
- Accounts
  A top-level Unica Plan account represents a corporate account that is established by a finance department for tracking and controlling expenditures and cash flows for specific areas of the business. Accounts can have subaccounts.
- Metrics
  Metrics are used for management reports and analysis. View metrics on the Tracking tab for plans, programs, and projects.
- Reports
  By default, Unica Plan provides a set of predefined reports and dashboard components. The Unica Plan reports package provides additional example reports and dashboard report components that are created in IBM® Cognos®, a separate business intelligence application.
- Searches
  You can perform simple and advanced searches in Unica Plan.
- Alerts and the message board
  You can use alerts and the message board both to communicate information to other users of Unica Plan. Alerts and the message board are available for plans, programs, projects, requests, assets, accounts, approvals, invoices, tasks, teams, and marketing objects.
- Reading a message on the message board
  You can read messages that were previously posted to the message board, if you have permission to view that object. Messages can be posted for plans, programs, projects, assets, accounts, approvals, or invoices.
- Checklists and To-dos
  Checklists are independent of other features of Plan and you can use checklists to maintain lists of to-dos for yourself or any other user.

Project health

In addition to the statuses that indicate the lifecycle stage of a project, Unica Plan calculates a health status for projects.

A project can be given one of the following default health statuses.

Healthy
Warning
Critical
Unknown

Note: Your system administrator can change these default names for your installation.

To objectively assess the overall health of a project, Unica Plan compares project data to thresholds for key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, a project with 0% of its tasks overdue and 0% of its milestones overdue is Healthy. However, if more than 5% of its tasks, or 3% of its milestones, are overdue, the project is Critical.

Your system administrator uses the KPIs to define rules for this calculation. The rules are associated with specific project templates, and therefore with the projects that use those templates.

The system automatically calculates project health status daily, and updates the calculation periodically throughout the day. In addition, you can manually initiate the health status calculation when needed.

Use the following features to review the health status of your project.

Subscribe to daily email notifications with the daily status. See Receiving project health status updates by email.
Click Operations > Projects and view a project list. The Project Health column shows the status that was calculated during the most recent automated periodic update.
View detailed information for a project and click its Health Status tab. When you click this tab, the system automatically updates the project health status; however, the values that are shown elsewhere in Unica Plan are not updated.
Add the Health Status portlet to your dashboard. See Unica Plan report portlets.

To facilitate analysis, reports are available to compare the health statuses that were calculated for different projects within a month or trending over time. See Multi-object reports.

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