Admin Projects..why use 'em?

[Mark Byington]

I hope some can help me here. I am looking for a reason to use
Administrative Projects.

From what I know so far, if a resource requests Vacation time using the
Administrative Project 'Notify Manager of time you won't be availabel' in the
task center in PWA, and submits it, that time gets scheduled in Proj Prof and
in PWA.
But, since it doesn't designate those vacation days as 'non-working' in the
persons resource calendar, they can still be scheduled for tasks during that
requested time off.

If a resource is allocated to Proj 'A' and Proj 'B', when a PM is building
Proj 'C' and assigns the resource a task, by viewing the 'Resource Usage',
all tasks in 'C' are shown, and Projects 'A' and 'B' are shown with any
assigned hours on the dates the PM is trying to schedule on Proj 'C'. The
Admin project is displayed but NO scheduled or actual hours are shown, so the
PM is unaware of any time conflict.

My question is, what do administrative projects do for the PM? Other than
tracking all non-project time in a convenient place, it seems that
overscheduling can be done easily.

Wouldn't it be easier to set up a 'regular' project for non-project time?
At least any over allocations would be visible while working in Project
Professional.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Mark --

You have officially joined the ranks of the many Project Server 2003 users
who are frustrated by the functionality of the default Administrative
projects feature. We recommend to our clients that they enter planned
non-working time such as vacation on each resource's individual calendar in
the Enterprise Resource Pool. Doing so will cause Project Server to
automatically reschedule work in any project impacted by the resource's
vacation time. At present, there is no automated way to enter the
nonworking time, and thus, the Project Server administrator (or someone
designated to do this) must do this manually.

As far as the usefulness of Administrative projects, some people find them
helpful to capture unplanned work or to capture a full 8 hours of work per
day. For this purpose, however, you could just as easily use a regular
project. Just some thoughts. Let's hope others share their opinions as
well.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Mark:

Vacation time effectively updated to an admin project does display in the
resource usage view. If it's not, it's not getting updated into the plan. No
other tasks should have assigned work in administrative plans. We agree that
creating overallocations for vacation time is an inadequate process for most
organizations and recommend that you implement a process to update the
resource calendars instead.

--


Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the books on Project Server"
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

For Project Server FAQs visit
http://www.projectserverexperts.com

For Project FAQs visit
http://www.mvps.org/project

 

[Gord Schmidt]

Hi Mark,

I have to agree with Gary and Dale. I think Admin Projects have the
potential to be useful in future versions of Project Server, but for now, it
is usually better to without them.

Gord

 

[Mark Byington]

Thanks guys...you've confirmed my suspicions. Now we need to decide what to
do instead. I appreciate the input...

 

[higginffx]

My two cents worth--
We are using admin projects to capture time spent on unplanned or overhead
tasks that are related to the "Main" project schedule, such as team meetings,
training, document reviews, etc. We change the working time in the
enterprise resource pool for indivduals to reflect vacations, etc.

The problem we have found is that the default task type for admin projects
is fixed duration, which really isn't the case since people may log hours
against the generic admin tasks once or many times. Then when the PM
processes the actual hours updates, they get messages that the duration of
the fixed duration task will change.

I submit that there needs to be a new task type called "Admin task" which
acts as a bucket to collect hours of actual work, but has no fixed work,
duration, or units.

 

[Paul DeLeo]

Gary & Dale, I've got Managing Enterprise Projects and Administering an
Enterprise PMO. In your "considerations for Using Administrative Projects",
you make a strong case against using them.

I am trying to use a regular project to do nothing more than account for our
employees' time spent on unplanned work with the intention of being able to
report it via the Portfolio analyzer

For time classification purposes, I've created tasks for each broad category
of unplanned work that we do. Is this approach viable? One problem I've
noticed is that I can't avoid specifying estimated hours for each task. Is
there a way around this? A task with a zero duration becomes a milestone and
isn't accessible to the team member when entering time. Can you point me to
any resources that explan, in detail, how to go about using regular projects
in place of admin projects?

Thanks,
Paul DeLeo

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Paul --

Your approach to tracking unplanned time in a regular project is solid. You
do need to assign a token amount of work to each task, however. You will
also need to teach your team members how to adjust the Remaining Work on
these tasks to keep the task from being hidden by the "Current tasks" option
on the PWA timesheet. Hope this helps.

 

[Girija]

Hi

So do you mean that we cant use the " Notify you Manager ....." link without
Administrative projects? or Can we still use that link to just report the
concerned person and not to track ? If so then during is absence who will be
working on that task?

Girija

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Girija --

You can only use the " Notify you Manager..." link with Administrative
projects. You cannot use it any other way. Hope this helps.