Project Management Office

[Rod C]

The decision has been made by the organization for which I am working to have
a project administrator control update of project plans. We are not goiong to
be using ProjectServer although it was recommended. We are using MS Project
2003 professional. There will be at least 2 project managers updating the
project plans. In some cases these are the same project plans. We have
recommended a common resource pool and that appears to be accepted. Do you
have any suggestions on how the project administration might work? How would
you suggest the administrator update the plans? How would you suggest the
project managers provide the updates? Any advice on reporting the updates to
the executive? I know this is not the recommended route nor "best practice"
but we are contrained by executive decision.

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

This solution is pretty common, and I have seen it work effectively - typically
for smaller organizations or projects w/o too many users.

How you update depends on what your methodology is: on the task level (%
Complete or % Work Complete) or on the assignment level (Hours worked per
day/week).

The latter is the option which I have seen many companies use most often.
In that case, you just need to make sure that all project resources are
reporting their hours in some fashion to the the project admin - typically
that would be done using a simple Access database, or sending Excel spreadsheets
each week. Then the Project Admin would manually key that information into
the project by opening the file and entering the data as Actuals in the Resource
Usage view. I would recommend doing that on a weekly basis, to reduce the
admin overhead (i.e. users report time spent per week, and not per day).

Periodically, the Project Admin would have to refresh the list of available
open tasks and send that out to each resource. It's a fair amount of manual
labor, but depending on who's doing it, I don't know that this would be more
expensive or cheaper than implementing Project Server. Your Admin should
probably track their own hours to get a handle on exactly what the Administrative
overhead is for this solution.

-A