Commenting hork hours

[Vlad Wax]

Hello, everyone.

Say, as an IT project manager, I use Project 2003 to publish project info on
a Project Server. Developers use Web Access to log actual time they've spent
on a task, but they also need to indicate what they've spent those hours for.
Thus, there is a great need for something like a text field, logging data in
time. When presenting a report to a client it is required to show what hours
were spent on what.

To my mind, this is a very natural task and it seems strange that it doesn't
have a simple solution, like a text field near Act.Work field in the right
table at the Task page of the Project Web Access. Comments (notes) are not
the way out, since time of a comment is not recorded.

May be the MS Project approach requires to create a new sub-task every time
for every small sub-problem? If so, it is not very effective.

Maybe I just miss something?
I would greatly appreciate any ideas.
Thanks in advance

 

[Steve House [MVP - MS Project]]

A "task" in project management - not just as far as MS Project is concerned
but the PM discipline itself - is defined as a *single* specific activity
performed by a resource, with definite beginning and end points, that
results in a single deliverable. So if Joe Resource spends today taking 2
hours debugging module X, 1 hour meeting with a client, 2 hours designing
module Y, 2 hours coding module Y, and 1 hour debugging module Y, he has
worked on 5 tasks, not just one or three. If your tasks are broken out
properly before pubishing the work plan to the server you don't need an
additional note field to detail what the resource did specifically because
each task is cohesive single activity in its own right and the task name
itself serves that purpose. To help them keep focused on that principle, I
teach my students to begin each task name in their task list with an action
verb - dig the hole, paint the wall, write the report, etc. So yes, you
should be creating a sub-task for every specific activity the resource is
doing.

I'm confused though because the tone of your post suggests that you are
doing the task lists after the fact. Project planning software - or for
that matter creating project plans with paper and pencil methods, not even
using software - is future oriented. It's designed for the manager to
*plan* what the resources are supposed to be doing when, plotting out what
needs to be done when in order to complete a project and not simply
accumulating information about what they have been doing. The plan should
be sufficiently detailed before publishing that if it was followed to the
letter, the end result would be the successful completion of the required
deliverable. All of the work that needs to be done to complete the project
should be detailed (that's the project scope) and nothing should be listed
that's not part of the work required to produce the project's deliverable.
Viewed another way, if the resources do nothing else except what is detailed
in the task list, they still will get done everything that is needed.

 

[Vlad Wax]

Steve, thank you for such a detailed answer.
My question was put in such way because our company has support projects as
well as development ones. If we receive a request from the client to fix
something and it takes just 10 minutes, MS Project will make us spend another
5 minutes creating a new task and commenting it.

Well, may be you're right, support is not a project, but does MS Project
offer anything to deal with such cases?

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Not really - if your activity doesn't fit into the realm of a true project
being managed through the Critical Path Methodology I'm afraid MSP is of
limited usefulness.

 

[TSaunders]

We have a similar issue. We create project plans and every one agrees to the
timelines. Then each week we need to record the number of hours actually
worked and summarize what we did. We are able to report the time elements,
but not attach a summary of work (notes) to a given week. For example - a
task is "Create Data Model" with estimated work = 50 hours to occur 6/13 -
6/24/2005. For the week of 6/13 I worked 25 hours and created 10 tables in
the model. In week 6/20 I worked 25 hours and completed the remaining 15
tables. A sample report would be:

TSaunders 6/13 - 17/2005 Create Data Model 25 hours Created 10 tables

And the followoing week report

TSaunders 6/20 - 24/2005 Create Data Model 25 hours Created 15 tables, data
model complete.

MS Project has all that we need except for tying notes to a date.

 

[Sarah]

You could always teach your resources to date their entries in the
Notes field for the task. At a prior company, we used the Notes for the
Project Summary task to indicate any major changes to the project
schedule as a whole, and when updates were made. We simply entered the
date, our initials, and the comment. The next time you need to comment,
just use a new line (we went in reverse chronological order so the most
recent comment was always at the top).

Sarah

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

You can always use the notes associated with a task on the back page of the
Task Information Form (double click the task id number) to detail out such
things. But do keep in mind that Project's primary job is plan out what
you're going to do in the future so that your projects get finished on time
and under budget. While it does track progress, its role is not focussed on
documenting what you have done to date but rather predicting what you should
be doing and when in the future you should be doing it. Put another way,
its job is to determine the future, not record the past.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[Dan Keen]

We come across this all the time with administrative "projects" that we have
setup for clients. Each client has a separate admin project, and there are
several tasks assigned in the plan. We had some developers using the Task
Notes field, but that got ugly very quickly, and was impossible to report on.

If you are using Project Server with Sharepoint Services, you could try
using the Issues view in PWA, and assign a new issue to a task when work is
done on it. For example, suppose you have an admin project for a client with
the following tasks:
- Reports
- Troubleshooting
- Meetings
- etc.
You could then link issues to each of those tasks that include more
detailied information about what was done. This allows you to have multiple
issues linked to a particular task without cluttering up the project plan.
If necessary, you can customize the Issues view for that project to include
the details you want to track. The down side is that you have a bit of
double-entry: they'll still have to enter time in their timesheets, AND track
the task detail in the related issue. You might want to try it with a sample
project first and see if that approach will work for you.

 

[Nancy Wood]

This information was very useful. At this point our workgroup needs the
ability to track tasks in the form of "operations and support", which is on
an ad-hoc basis, moreso than planned project-specific work. Other groups use
Project Server for specific projects but our responsibilities are generally
support and troubleshooting. It appears an admin project is the best tool
for this purpose. Since Dan Keen's answer was posted in September, has
another solution arisen that would allow more flexibility regarding the task
assignments? - Nancy Wood

 

[Nancy Wood]

You can disregard this question, I found the answer under the Project Server
Experts FAQ for developing an "administrative plan." It appears to be the
best solution for tracking a workgroup's maintenance/support time. And
instead of adding the task details through the Issues list as Dan suggested,
I plan to add them through the weekly Status Report process - inserting each
summary task w/ hours into the report, then adding detail underneath it.
Thanks for your support, this website is extremely useful.