Actuals Disappearing in the project

[BTOjohn]

I have an issue with an administrative project (env is Project 2003 +
server). Yesterday I asked a project manager to add a number of people to a
task in an administrative project. From how he describes the process he
undertook, I do not understand why there is now an issue. He assigned the
resources to the task through the Assign Resources Dialogue Box, and then he
made units, duration and work zero.

There were already c. 20 people assigned to this task, all of whom had
historically submitted actuals. Somehow, all of the actuals have disappeared,
except for one resource, where now work is greater than actual work, which is
of course unneccessary in an admin project.

In PWA-Resources-View Resource Assignments all of the time still appeats in
the tasksheet of the individual resources. However, the actuals are no longer
in the project, and do not appear in portfolio analyser (despite the fact
that they did appear there yesterday). There are no errors in the event
viewer that relate to this issue, which has me even more confused.

Help would be greatly appreciated - I want to understand what is going on
here.

Cheers in advance,

John

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

BTOjohn --

Did you create this project using the Administrative Time enterprise
template, or create a regular project and then save it by selecting the
"Administrative project" option in the Save to Project Server dialog? If
the answer is yes to this question, then the project manager in question
needed only to assign the resources to the tasks. When he changed the
Duration of the task to 0 days, the software will set the Work, Remaining
Work, and Actual Work to 0 hours for that task. Hope this helps.

 

[BTOjohn]

Hi Dale,

Thanks very much for getting back to me on this. We use to templates created
by my predecessor, one standard project, one admin. Is there any way of
telling whether they are modified versions of the enterprise template?

Did you mean that if we used the enterprise template then the described
behavious would be normal?

One last question. Since what you said makes a whole lot of sense, can you
recommend best practise for adding resources to an admin project without
essentially deleting actuals that have already been submitted?

Many thanks,

John

 

[BTOjohn]

Oh, and can you recommend a nice easy (!) way of getting the time back frmo
the timesheets into the project?

Cheers,

John

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

BTO John --

1. Open the project in question and click File - Properties. At the bottom
of the dialog you you will see a field called Project that will list the
template used. What do you see there? If it says Administrative Time, the
previous owner used the default template found in Project Server.

2. The behavior you are seeing is normal for both regular projects and
administrative projects. When the PM added the new resource to the task, on
an administrative project he should have simply assigned the resource to the
task, without resetting the Duration and Work to 0 hours. When the PM added
the new resource to a task, on a regular project he should have assigned the
resource and set the Units value to a number representing the percentage of
an an average week that the resource will committ to the task, and should
not have set the Duration to 0 days and Work to 0 hours. In either case,
you can see that the setting of the Duration to 0d and the Work to 0h was
the source of your problem.

3. See my response to your latest post for a potential solution.

Hope this helps.

 

[BTOjohn]

Hi Dale,

It does say Administrative Time, so we're doing the right thing there. I
guess the PM entered zero for duration and work because of this point that
admin projects do not require an allocation of work, but he did not think of
the impact on the whole task when setting it for individual resources! I
don't know why I didn't click immediately, of course it makes sense, and
thanks for pointing it out.

We're going to give your other suggestion a bash - I'll let you know what
happens.

Cheers for all your help, its much appreciated.

John