Adminitstrative Projects & Tasks - what makes them special?

D

dianaw

So far, I've been able to determine the following unique attributes of Administrative tasks
1. Fixed Duration, Not Effort Drive
2. Estimated Duratio
3. Can't be "hidden" on timeshee
4. Are grouped separately on the "Adjust Actuals" view when more than 1 resource is selecte
5. Are not imported to Outlook for reporting time via Outloo

Items 3-4-5 are preventing me from making it easier for my team to view and report on their tasks. Items 1 and 2 are easily re-created in any project schedule (not just an Administrative project). Is there more to Administrative tasks that I haven't discovered? I'm considering moving them into a regular schedule so they can be managed more freely

Any ideas
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

dianaw --

The struggles you have had with Administrative projects is typical. I would
recommend that you use regular projects to handle your administrative task
tracking to eliminate the problems with 3, 4, and 5. If you wish to
differentiate admin plans for regular production projects, you could set up
a custom enterprise project outline code field with values like "Admin",
"Production", etc. Doing so would allow you to create custom Views in the
Project center to group by the type of project, and would also allow you to
differentiate the projects in the Portfolio Analyzer views. Just my
opinion. Perhapt the others will want to comment also.




dianaw said:
So far, I've been able to determine the following unique attributes of Administrative tasks:
1. Fixed Duration, Not Effort Driven
2. Estimated Duration
3. Can't be "hidden" on timesheet
4. Are grouped separately on the "Adjust Actuals" view when more than 1 resource is selected
5. Are not imported to Outlook for reporting time via Outlook

Items 3-4-5 are preventing me from making it easier for my team to view
Click to expand...
and report on their tasks. Items 1 and 2 are easily re-created in any
project schedule (not just an Administrative project). Is there more to
Administrative tasks that I haven't discovered? I'm considering moving them
into a regular schedule so they can be managed more freely.
 
S

Sean

Diana

If the default features of administrative projects bother you, create a new standard project and set the priority to 1000. This way the project will behave just like a normal project. The only piece of functionality you sacrifice is the “Report non-project time to manager..blah..blah..†Of course, you could have your resources use the “Create a Task†link

Hope this helps

---------------------
Sean Pale
EPM Solutions Grou
Bennett Adelso
www.bennettadelson.co


----- dianaw wrote: ----

So far, I've been able to determine the following unique attributes of Administrative tasks
1. Fixed Duration, Not Effort Drive
2. Estimated Duratio
3. Can't be "hidden" on timeshee
4. Are grouped separately on the "Adjust Actuals" view when more than 1 resource is selecte
5. Are not imported to Outlook for reporting time via Outloo

Items 3-4-5 are preventing me from making it easier for my team to view and report on their tasks. Items 1 and 2 are easily re-created in any project schedule (not just an Administrative project). Is there more to Administrative tasks that I haven't discovered? I'm considering moving them into a regular schedule so they can be managed more freely

Any ideas
 
D

dwolf

Dale,

I am also investigating Admin Projects solely for the reporting of Vacation
time and absence. On the surface this appears to be a way to allow
resources to give advance notice of absence without the hit or miss of
emails. Otherwise we get notified that a resource is taking time off the
Friday before it occurs - not timely at all.

In my company the hours need to be charged against an overhead account
(which is handled easily by the addition of a published text field), so this
seems like a good solution. Plus the ""Report non-project time to manager"
only seems to work with Admin projects - otherwise the functionality is
there but unusable.

The part I have yet to work out is whether to add budgets - since the
company allows 5 vacation days and 5 sick days whether it is feasible to
include this information in the tasks at the assignment level.

Has anyone successfully implemented this feature? What are the down sides
to using it this way?

--DWolf
 
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