Project Migration and Actual Time

  • Thread starter J Burford Fields
  • Start date
J

J Burford Fields

I've saved a project as a mpp file, imported it to a new project
server, then republished assignments overwriting time.

The test user sees time that she had recorded against a future task,
last reporting period, showing up in what appears to be a pro-rated
fashion on the task, next week, as actual hours -- as if she had typed
them into her timesheet.

This is a bit scary as we use timesheets as something of an official
record.

Can anyone shed any light on what might be going on? We are hoping to
migrate the whole business to a new set of servers and all was going
well until this! (Well, almost all, but that's another story).

J
 
G

Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]

JB:

Sounds like an inappropriate use of Fixed-Duration tasks. Are the tasks in
question set as Fixed Duration?
 
J

J Burford Fields

Hi Gary,

No, they're either Fixed Work or Fixed Units. The summary tasks do
show up as Fixed Duration and cannot be changed, as far as I can tell.

J
 
J

J Burford Fields

Aha!

I was searching the newsgroup and saw somebody suggesting using an xml
file for the export and import. That, interestingly enough, provides
me with correct results! Quite a thing to see two versions of the same
source project sitting side by side in the Resource's Assignments and
to see different totals for each day!

J
 
J

J Burford Fields

For the record:

I later discovered bothersome problems with historical time imported
via XML. About 40% of the users had incorrect totals for the reporting
period. Investigation found a variety of maladies.

Frequently, a 1.5 hour entry became 1.52 and two of them added up to
3.03.

Actual hours redistributed themselves. I had ten hours move in one
week to the last day (when I had been off and recorded no time) on my
own task record!

Hours were missing. As this was a more noticable problem in the recent
reporting periods than in early ones, I presume that much attention
must be given to making sure resources have updated their time, not
just saved it, and that task managers have accepted all updates.

Merry Christmas, all!
 
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