Use My Tasks for timesheeting

[James Triggs]

Hi everyone,

I am in a simple environment, where we don't have resource managers who need
to approve timesheets. To make things easy for resources we have decided just
to use My tasks as the place to enter timesheet information. We have created
a separate project called "Administration" which contains tasks such as
support, leave, training, etc. and want these to always appear in my tasks
every week so that people can put some time against them if required.

What is the best way to get these tasks to always appear in My tasks without
having a significant impact on our forward resource forecasts? Tasks like
"support" will have a percentage time allocation each week, whereas others
such as "sick leave" have no planned time allocation but just capture actual
hours. We also want to make it simple to accept the updates on these
administration type tasks.

I realise much of this functionality is in timesheets, but I want to keep
things as simple as possible for resources, so am trying to rely on My Tasks.

Thanks in advance,

James

 

[reza]

James...

since you don't have a resource manager, why don't you add your PM become a
Resouce Manager too, or maybe you can set your team members as Resource
manager by her/himself...so in timesheet will auto generated by system.

 

[Gary Chefetz]

James, you can use regular projects for this. Note that you need to learn
how to manage these, but with a little finesse, you can handle it. The
following solution goes back to 2003, but the ideas still apply:

http://www.projectserverexperts.com...ledgeBase/RegularProjectLikeAdminProject.aspx

 

[James Triggs]

Hi Gary, Thanks for the link.

After some experimenting I plan to set up the following, can anyone see any
problems with this?

A Project support task - fixed units (say 30%) and set the task up to run
for a very long time (say 10 years) so that people never need to update
remaining work.

A task for capturing actuals of leave taken - fixed duration. Since I always
want this to appear in task manager, I will schedule 1 hours work to happen
over the 10 years of this task. This will mean that each week people have a
tiny amount of planned work, keeping the task in My tasks, but not enough to
affect foreward resource planning. In the last year of this task I will also
add a large amount of planned work, so that as people enter actuals they
never have to update the remaining work.

We are also limiting our cube building to only one year in the future.

Hopefully this makes sense and is a sound approach, but please let me know
if you think I will run into any troubles with this.

Thanks for your help.

James

 

[Gary Chefetz]

James:

The only problem I see is that you'll quickly run out of remaining work if
you don't have your users update remaining work every time they use some.