Questions about managed time periods and time tracking

[Tricia R.]

We are currently implemented with non-managed time periods and are reporting
actual and remaining work per week. There is now a need to transition to
managed time periods for a "subset" of our employees (yikes). So we were
wondering if it is possible to switch to managed time periods but only
require some employees have their timesheets approved by their resource
manager. And if it isn't possible to do this, what are the ramifications of
a bunch of timesheets sitting and waiting for approval? Probably one issue
would be the notifications that would display on the project dashboard. Any
others?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Tricia R --

If you implement Managed Time Periods with timesheet approval, this will be
applied to all users in Project Server. However, the consequences are not
as severe as you assume. When you use timesheet approval, this allows
someone like a resource manager to approve actuals before the project
manager updates the actuals into the Microsoft Project plan. When your
resource managers can have the timesheet approval permission enabled for
them, this will allow them to approve the timesheet actuals of their
resources.

Once you enable this feature in Project Server, your project managers will
need to make one slight change to their Updates page in PWA. They will each
need to navigate to the Updates page, click the View Options tab, and then
select the "Show timesheet status" option. This option is not enabled by
default, so each one will need to do this. Once done, the project managers
will be able to examine each set of actuals to see which have been approved
and which have not been approved by a resource manager. Actuals that have
not been approved will have an asterisk to the right of each Actual Work
value in the timesheet grid.

However, do know this: timesheet approval does NOT prevent a project
manager from updating actuals that have not been approved by a resource
manager. In fact, Project Server will always allow a project manager to
update actuals, regardless of whether a resource manager has approved them
or not. Hope this helps.

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