Project Server 2003 / Tracking vacation time / Administrative projects

[Aleksey Dmitriyev]

I am trying to find out the best way to track the vacation time in Project
Server 2003. I read the documentation and created Administrative project for
that. I am not sure how to use it. Should I create a vacation task per
person per vacation? In the example in the documentation, they show multiple
resources assigned to one "Vacation" task. What does that mean, all assigned
people take vacation at the same time?

Thanks,
Aleksey

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Aleksey --

Create a single vacation task and assign all resources to the task. Or
create a vacation task for each team or department, and then assign
resources from the appropriate team/department to each task. Each resource
can submit vacation time from the View My Tasks page PWA.

Do know, however, that the vacation time entered in the administrative
project for a resource will not impact the schedule of any project to which
the resource is assigned. In order for this to happen, the vacation must be
entered on the resource's calendar in the Enterprise Resource Pool. This
problem is a limitation of the administrative project feature. Hope this
helps.

--
Dale A. Howard [MVP]
Enterprise Project Trainer/Consultant
Denver, Colorado
http://www.msprojectexperts.com
"We wrote the book on Project Server"

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Vaughn --

Unfortunately, you are one of many who is finding limited usefulness of the
Administrative projects feature of Project Server 2003. One would assume
that time submitted as Vacation to an administrative project would mark out
the vacation time as nonworking time on the resource's calendar, and then
have the system automatically schedule project work into the next available
time period. Sadly, this is not the case. The time will go into the
Administrative project and be logged as vacation. You can then view the
Resource Usage view to see who has vacation time scheduled and during what
time periods. You can also use the Admin project for costing nonworking
time.

If you want to have vacation and sick leave automatically impact the project
schedule for each project to which the resource is assigned, you will need
to manually enter the nonworking time on each user's individual calendar in
the Enterprise Resource Pool. Hope this clarification helps.

So what is the usefulness of the Administrative Project feature? I don't

understand. If someone is going to be away on vacation, etc, wouldn't you
want the schedule to be adjusted accordingly? From what you are saying, this
is not the case with Admin projects, correct?

Having read a number of posts on this subject on this discussion group, I

have to admit to being somewhat confused! If I want my project schedules to
adjust according to people's availability, should I just create a regular
plan with non-project tasks in it, or is there some advantage to using an
Admin Project I'm missing?

 

[Vaughn Wiles]

Dale

Many thanks for the clarification. Hopefully Microsoft might rectify this 'feature' in a future patch or release. Even better, make it a configurable feature so organisations can decide how they want to use Admin projects.

--
Regards

Vaughn Wiles
Head of Projects, Technical Development,
Teletext Ltd
London, UK

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Vaughn --

The irony of this situation is that Microsoft had a reporting feature in
Project Server 2002 that allowed a resource to submit nonworking time to a
someone, who could then update the information into the Enterprise Resource
Pool. The problem with this approach was that the system allowed the
resource to submit the nonworking time to a project manager, who does not
have rights to open the Enterprise Resource Pool for editing. The
nonworking time needed to be submitted only to someone with administrator
rights who functions as the Enterprise Resource Pool administrator. In
addition, even if the nonworking time was submitted to someone with
administrator permissions, that person had to open the Enterprise Resource
Pool BEFORE updating the nonworking time, otherwise the update would try to
go into a project plan and not the Enterprise Resource Pool.

What I am wishing Microsoft had done was to fix the above feature so that
the system would only allow nonworking time updates to be submitted to
someone with administrator permissions, and so that when the admin updated
the nonworking time, it would only go into the Enterprise Resource Pool.
That would have nicely solved the problem and might have made administrative
projects more useful and less frustrating. Just an opinion.

Dale

Many thanks for the clarification. Hopefully Microsoft might rectify this

'feature' in a future patch or release. Even better, make it a configurable
feature so organisations can decide how they want to use Admin projects.