Administrative Projects

[Ben Allen]

Hello,

I am looking for some definitive information regarding admin plans in
ProjectServer2003.
I've read a lot of mixed information about their use. Some advice
simply states to keep well clear of them, whilst other advice states
that with a well planned design and continued maintenance admin plans
can work very well.

I'm looking for information from both sides of the fence, but with
some examples/justification to backup their claim.

Many thanks

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Ben --

I believe the chief limitation of an Administrative project is trying to use
it for tracking nonworking time, such as vacation. When you use an
Administrative project to track nonworking time, the time entered in the
project DOES NOT reschedule task work automatically around each nonworking
time period. This means that many or all of the projects in your system
become "optimistically scheduled" because they do not reflect the real
schedule based on each resource's nonworking time. The only way to get
Project Server to schedule task work around nonworking time is to enter the
nonworking time on each resource's personal calendar in the Enterprise
Resource Pool.

A strength of Administrative projects is to use them to track unplanned work
and unplanned nonworking time, such as sick leave. You will also find an
Administrative project useful for tracking ongoing work such as maintenance
work.

There are some little annoyances you might face when using an Administrative
project. For example, a team member cannot hide an Administrative task on
their PWA timesheet. I'm neither "pro" nor "con" on using Administrative
projects for any purpose. My recommendation would be for you to try it, and
if you like the results, go for it. Hope this helps.

 

[Ben Howard]

They do of course effect the resources availability, so putting time on an
admin project allows that time to show on the View Availability field in the
resource center, though, as Dale states, it still allows you to happily
schedule resources to work during that time.
--
Thanks, Ben.
http://appleparkltd.spaces.live.com/

 

[ljsexton]

You may be interested in how our company approached the concerns. Seems to be
working ok for us. We have a "Normal" project defined for each dept manager
and each manages their own dept resources . this Dept NON Project Time
project is for recording any work not directly associated to an actual
company project. Uses are for Vacation, Med, Holidays, Misc Meetings, Other
time consuming "To Dos" - This approach also allows us to generate our
company timesheets directly from PWA as all of our time is recorded in PWA
timesheet task screens. We decided to not use the Administrative type
project as it did not provide the flexibilty we needed to track all time for
timesheets plus be able to see who is truly available for work on other
projects. Not a prefect solution but so far seems to be working ok.
Jackie