Administrative projects

[arlo]

Last month I've already posted some questions about actuals in the
projectfile that were not equal to the actuals in the timesheets of employees.

Last weeks we've narrowed the problem down to:
administrative projects and non working time.
In our organisation it happend that projectfile owners made changes to admin
projects for example added a resource to a task which already contained
assigned resources. Project starts asking planning questions like increase
duration or increase work. And this is exactly the moment that things go
WRONG.

Project starts planning with the admin project. So on the admin project
tasks there will be planned work. When people start updating their actual non
project time, for example 8 hrs sick last week and those 8 hours are accepted
by the projectmanager the following happens.

project updates the actual hours and ADDS the planned work (in this case
around 620 hours devided equally according to the person calendar) And puts
the sum of both in the actual work protected!

I understood from a MS engineer that the design of the admin projects works
like this. Project considers planned work as actual work when no actual is
submitted.
So one way to solve this is to type real zero values in the timesheet in all
tasks of the admin project. This is not very fault tolerant, a lot of work
(600 persons) and will increase the database volume a lot.

We had a workable solution by:
-using a macro to change all planned work to zero
-not synching to the actuals
-publish (al planned work in the admin project and web environment will be
zero)
-update actuals (which cleans up the projectfile)

This is also a lot of work and could be a solution, wouldn't it be that
things go wrong again when people start administring hours on non working
days. For example. type 8 hours on holiday leave when it is a national
holiday (which of course is in the global calender).

Any help will be appreciated very much as we are having major problems over
here.
(the incorrectly published files are the basis for the olap cube)

We use projectserver 2003 sp1 and managed time periods is activated.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Arlo:

The correct way to use Administrative projects is to assign all resources at
zero 0 percent, with the exception of planned vacation time. If you're
assigning work effort, you'll continue to have problems.

--


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

 

[arlo]

Correct, thankts

but how to stop that from happening. There are 85 admin projects in our
organisation al managed by different persons.

and of course how to correct the current currentdata. Manually is almost not
an option.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Arlo:

Best practice with admin projects is to end them every 3 or 6 months. If you
change them every quarter, then you get to clean things up periodically. You
have a choice: Train your users to use Admin projects correctly, or train
them to use regular projects for admin purposes. Unfortunatley, both
approaches require time and training.

--


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

 

[arlo]

Hmm.

I was afraid of that. They are trained, but as project offers all
functionality to the users its just a matter of time before things corrupt
again.
We'll write macro with an onsave event. When work>0. the manager will be
promted to change that.

thanks Gary.

"Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]" schreef:

 

[Andrew Perkins]

Arlo,

We're having the same problem, and your solution looks good.

Any chance you could post the macro text here or send it to me somehow, to
save us some time? I will send back any enhancements, e.g., to run on all
projects and check for "Administrative" flag before continuing.

Best regards.