I have a project plan, but I seem to have more conflicts now

Question

Some users have noticed more conflicts now that they are using a project plan. The most likely cause of this is that the team is not doing Send-and-Receives often enough. The project plan can manage editing permissions, but it does not initiate Send-and-Receive. The users need to remember to perform Send-and-Receive at the appropriate times. The old rules for Send-and-Receives still apply. Namely, that after translator A edits a verse on his computer, he needs to do a Send-and-Receive with translator B before she makes any edits in that same verse.

Answer 1

A couple of other notes on the “increasing” number of conflicts:

• Make sure that you have the manual permissions turned off in the User Permissions dialog. Click on the Book Permissions button in that dialog, and make sure there are no check marks in the boxes in the dialog that comes up.
• That dialog will show you (in gray-blue) where the project plan is giving permissions to modify each book. You can still end up with multiple users who can modify a book, even with manual permissions turned off, from the permissions granted by the project plan, for example:
  
  In this case two users can modify the book of Matthew, and two can modify the book of John. Note that you can click on the book link at the top of the column to show the permissions for the individual chapters:
  
  In this case, there can be no conflict in chapter 1, but two users can both edit all the other other chapters, which could result in conflicts.
• One way to have multiple people who can edit a book/chapter is when Scripture Checks are assigned to different members of the team. If there is a chapter/verse number error in the book, then the person assigned that check will have write access to the book, to fix the error. My recommendation in this case is to not assign the checks until you are ready to work on correcting the errors, possibly after you have finished creating the first draft.
• Another way to have multiple people who can edit a book/chapter is if a task in your project plan doesn’t rely on the previous task to be completed before it can start. The beginning of Stage 2 in the SIL Compact Project Plan has a number of tasks that don’t rely on the previous task and yet allow modifying of the text, such as: Naturalness check, Exegetical check, Format check. If you have assigned these three tasks to different members of your team, they will all have permission to modify the text at the same time. My recommendation in this case is to have good communication in the team and make sure that you aren’t working on the same chapters at the same time. You could also only assign the task when the person is ready to start it. Or if you have a definite order in your team in which you want to carry out those three tasks, then put them in that order in your project plan (can be done by the Administrator), and change the setting on the task of the field “When can this task start?” to “After previous task is complete”. Then you will need to complete the first task before the second can start.

This problem isn’t really any worse than it was before the project plan was applied, when you were just assigning permissions manually. We were always told that it was bad if multiple people could modify the same text - when it showed up in red. It’s just that now there are ways that the project plan can assign permissions automatically, so we need to understand them better. We need to understand that assigning tasks in the project plan can also give permissions to modify the text, so we need to do that carefully.

Hope that helps with understanding the issues better.

Comments

jeffh, thank you for your detailed description of the issues involved and raising awareness that administrators need to pay attention to permissions even when a project plan is being used. Manual permissions were passed on to Paratext 8/9 when projects were migrated from 7. Administrators should do what you advised and look at the permissions for their projects.

Migration and editing permissions -- effect project plan

Editing permissions are copied from Paratext 7 to Paratext 8 during migration. This can potentially cause problems if a project plan is used to manage permissions after migration. The editing permissions that are set in Users, Roles and Permissions override the attempts of the project plan to give and take away permissions as work on the translation project progresses. The potential exists for more than one person having editing permission for the same verse. It is recommended that the permis…

Answer 2

So in reality, assigning tasks to specific users does not work
unless all users have access to S/R regularly and often. There is
also an assumption that every user is working on Paratext every day.
If Joe goes off on a weeklong fishing trip and does not open PT on
his computer, the whole team can be hung up until he decides to get
back to work. (Assuming that, even if you have automatic S/R enabled
the program must be open and internet connected to enable
it, right?)

Or if Steven is assigned the exegetical check of Romans, he must

remember to tick off each chapter in the project plan as he finishes
it, and then do a S/R. If he finishes a chapter but forgets to tick
the box everyone is hung up.

The more I interact with the cool new features of the Project Plan

the more gotchas I see, for translation teams who do not do their
regular work sitting together in an office!

Just wondering how our team is going to handle it all....
KimB