Inactive Resources - Best Practices ???

[Shawn Everingham]

What is the best practice for dealing with enterprise resources in msps 2007
who leave the company?

I know this question has been asked, and the answer seems to be just
inactivate the resource...however...this is MSPS 2007 and it has it's fair
share of challenges to say the least.

The story:

Resource ABC is an active resource in msps 2007.
Resource ABC is assigned task NOP on Project XYZ.
Actual work is applied to task NOP by Resource ABC.
Task NOP is now 50% complete. Resource ABC leaves the company.
Project Manager sets all of ABC's remaining work on task NOP to zero.
Couple weeks go by, MSPS Sys Admin (me), sets ABC's status to INACTIVE.
Now everytime PM opens Project XYZ, they get a message stating, This project
has inactive enterprise resources with remaining work, which they just deal
with and click OK.

This has been our routine, the warning message is very ANNOYING, to say the
least.

So, 6 mos. have gone by. Resource ABC's NT account has been deleted.
Project XYZ is having daily difficulty getting published, often times
hanging up on the publish at 95%.
I have to DAILY restart the Queue Service and Cancel all the Jobs for
Project XYZ, eventually getting it pushed thru the queue so that the PM can
open up this project and perform updates.

PM reaches a level of frustration that leads to me advising to save Project
XYZ as an XML file, because I am suspecting corruption of some sort. We
rebuild the project from the XML file. Due to our global template, we make
customizations to the columns in the Gantt Chart View, and save the project
as an MPP file to our local harddrive.

We then use Import Project to Enterprise and due to inactive resources, the
map resource step leaves us hanging with 6 or so INACTIVE resources. We goto
step 3 in the import project wizard, which then tells us we have duplicate
resources on the plan and we have to correct the error messages.

HOW DO YOU CORRECT THE ERROR MESSAGES? I can't set the resources status back
to active, because their NT account is no longer valid and it will not save
my changes.

HOW DO WE DEAL WITH EMPLOYEES WHO LEAVE THE COMPANY???? Inactivating them
doesn't seem to be the answer, or it doesn't seem to be working as I would
expect it, which leads me to believe that MS hasn't thought about it very
much.

Any help or advice out there? thanks!
Shawn

 

[Ravi]

What is the best practice for dealing with enterprise resources in msps 2007
who leave the company?

I know this question has been asked, and the answer seems to be just
inactivate the resource...however...this is MSPS 2007 and it has it's fair
share of challenges to say the least.

The story:

Resource ABC is an active resource in msps 2007.
Resource ABC is assigned task NOP on Project XYZ.
Actual work is applied to task NOP by Resource ABC.
Task NOP is now 50% complete. Resource ABC leaves the company.
Project Manager sets all of ABC's remaining work on task NOP to zero.
Couple weeks go by, MSPS Sys Admin (me), sets ABC's status to INACTIVE.
Now everytime PM opens Project XYZ, they get a message stating, This project
has inactive enterprise resources with remaining work, which they just deal
with and click OK.

This has been our routine, the warning message is very ANNOYING, to say the
least.

So, 6 mos. have gone by. Resource ABC's NT account has been deleted.
Project XYZ is having daily difficulty getting published, often times
hanging up on the publish at 95%.
I have to DAILY restart the Queue Service and Cancel all the Jobs for
Project XYZ, eventually getting it pushed thru the queue so that the PM can
open up this project and perform updates.

PM reaches a level of frustration that leads to me advising to save Project
XYZ as an XML file, because I am suspecting corruption of some sort. We
rebuild the project from the XML file. Due to our global template, we make
customizations to the columns in the Gantt Chart View, and save the project
as an MPP file to our local harddrive.

We then use Import Project to Enterprise and due to inactive resources, the
map resource step leaves us hanging with 6 or so INACTIVE resources. We goto
step 3 in the import project wizard, which then tells us we have duplicate
resources on the plan and we have to correct the error messages.

HOW DO YOU CORRECT THE ERROR MESSAGES? I can't set the resources status back
to active, because their NT account is no longer valid and it will not save
my changes.

HOW DO WE DEAL WITH EMPLOYEES WHO LEAVE THE COMPANY???? Inactivating them
doesn't seem to be the answer, or it doesn't seem to be working as I would
expect it, which leads me to believe that MS hasn't thought about it very
much.

Any help or advice out there? thanks!
Shawn

Hi Shawn,

As of I know, if you set the WorkGroup of the employee who left, his
assignments would not get published. This way you can avoid publish
errors. Otherwise make it as a local resource.

Thanks,
Ravi.

 

[Ravi]

Hi Shawn,

  As of I know, if you set the WorkGroup of the employee who left, his
assignments would not get published. This way you can avoid publish
errors. Otherwise make it as a local resource.

Thanks,
Ravi.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Sorry, I mean to set the WorkGroup of the resource account to NONE. In
this way, it is understood that you do not use team collaboration for
this resource.

Thanks,
Ravi.

 

[Shawn Everingham]

Thank you Ravi. I will give this a try.

However, with those employees that have moved on to bigger and better
things, their NT Accounts have been deleted and MSPS Admin console for
Resources doesn't allow me to make ANY edits to that resource. It's like I'm
stuck...

Thoughts?
thanks!

 

[Ravi]

Thank you Ravi. I will give this a try.

However, with those employees that have moved on to bigger and better
things, their NT Accounts have been deleted and MSPS Admin console for
Resources doesn't allow me to make ANY edits to that resource. It's like I'm
stuck...

Thoughts?
thanks!
--
Technology, like art, is a soaring stretch of our imagination...Daniel Bell.
1919







- Show quoted text -

I understand your situation. Most of the deployments handle this in
below way
1. Every week or month, MSPS admin gets list of employees gone away
from the company
2. Admin immediately delete those resources. Project had those users
show them a local.
3. PM's set the WorkGroup option to None for those local resources to
avoid publish errors
4. NT account gets deleted & Your resource pool becomes clean.

You can suggest this way, or anyone else have any better solutions for
this?

Thanks,
Ravi.