Project Center Views

[RandyK]

I have a question on Project Center Views. Is there a way to pull phase and
task level information into a Project Center view ? An example would be to
show the status of a Project's Phases or to show Phases that are expected to
be completed in the next 2-4 weeks.


Any help you can provide will be appreciated.

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

Your question reminded me of a blog posting I'd seen a while back and prompted
me to go search it out. This might be what you're looking for. I haven't
tried it myself, but it looks interesting:

http://evildoctorporkchop.spaces.li...y?_c11_blogpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=blogpart

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

After posting that last post, I reread your question. Here's some more information
that may be helpful:

1) Can you display Phase level information in a Project Center view? You
can't have multiple tasks in a Gantt Chart, but if you create a custom field
for each phase status, you can definitely have that roll up to the Project
Center view.

2) As for phases that are expected to be completed, you can finagle that
again with some custom formulas and fields. For instance, I have a flag
field that flags phase summary tasks. Then, I create a custom text formula
that, if the phase field is toggled yes, and if the finish date is within
the next two weeks, then it will display the task name. As long as your
phases are more than two weeks in duration, that should more or less work
- with some tinkering.

You may want to consider what you mean by "today + 2 weeks." Project server
only calculates that when the project is published. I.e. the current date
in PWA for the project may really be two weeks ago when the project was published
- or you could go by status date, which is probably more accurate, but has
the same limitations.

-A

 

[Marc Soester [MVP]]

Hi Randyk,

to add to Andrews great post, generally you will always have the issue that
you dont know when the project was publised last. The project Center will not
automatically re-calculate based on dates, or events. It will only show what
you published last.

The only workaround that I have for this, is to ensure that your PM's set
the Status Date of the Project and you show this status date in the Project
Center. At least you know what the last update status was according to your
PM.

Because of this limitation, I would be careful using calculations the have
"....+ 2 weeks" in it. I would ensure that the information in the Project
Center is alwasy "Current" project information, which essentally means "last
published".

Anyway, my 2 cents worth

PS: you may want to consider generating "Exeption Reports" using Reporting
Services. This will allow you to interragate your schedule within the Project
Server Reporting DB and based on your assignements you can display your
"Planned" work / phase within the report.

Hope this helps