Reporting Non-Working Time - Administrative Projects

[Dominic Moss]

I am looking for some guidance on reporting resource non-availability due to
time booked off:

Whilst Administrative Projects can provide a useful means to capture
non-project time to my mind they are not much use when it comes to trying to
model the impact of resources holiday/vacation booked time off work in
advance. I advocate editing resource availability to show a window of time
being unavailable when a resource has booked time off. The advantage of this
allied to "premature baselining" is that reduced resource availability and
its likely impact on projects can be assessed at an early stage. Once a
resource had taken time off this can be updated in an Administrative
project.

What I would like to be able to do is to produce a report that "counts" the
number of non-working days each resource has in a defined window of time -
this would obviously have to exclude weekends where they are non-working
time by default in the resource base calendar.

Looking at the Resource Usage view a resource can either have work and
remaining availability, work and overallocation or no work and no remaining
availability - the last being periods when nonworking time has been defined
for individual resources.

Does anyone on the newsgroup have experience in producing this kind of
report using SQL and displaying the results in a web view?
--
Dominic Moss

www.projectability.co.uk

Helping people achieve more with Microsoft Project

Tel +44 8707 303 400
Fax +44 8707 303 500

 

[RickD]

If you want to report on your unavailability, then create your own
"administrative" project. You can either identify tasks to represent the
types of unavailability, or your resource manager(s) can identify each
person's unavailable time (i.e. vacation) as a task unto itself. The
advantage of this method is that you have something that can be reported/seen.

If your only rationale is to identify potential issues, then alternatively
you can authorize your resource managers to update resource calendars to
identify when resources are unavailable. The unavailable time will then be
reflected in every plan across the enterprise when unavailable resources are
assigned. The advantage of this is less administration. The disadvantage is
that the effects are surreptitious. The PM must determine why a task suddenly
taskes way longer because a resource is away for 3 weeks.

 

[Dominic Moss]

If you want to report on your unavailability, then create your own
"administrative" project. You can either identify tasks to represent the
types of unavailability, or your resource manager(s) can identify each
person's unavailable time (i.e. vacation) as a task unto itself. The
advantage of this method is that you have something that can be
reported/seen.

If your only rationale is to identify potential issues, then alternatively
you can authorize your resource managers to update resource calendars to
identify when resources are unavailable. The unavailable time will then be
reflected in every plan across the enterprise when unavailable resources
are
assigned. The advantage of this is less administration. The disadvantage
is
that the effects are surreptitious. The PM must determine why a task
suddenly
taskes way longer because a resource is away for 3 weeks.

Rick,

Thanks for the suggestion but what I am angling towards is a SQL query
delivering a report on the required information.

Dominic Moss

www.projectability.co.uk

Helping people achieve more with Microsoft Project

Tel +44 8707 303 400
Fax +44 8707 303 500

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Dominic:

How does producing a report address your initial comments?:

"Whilst Administrative Projects can provide a useful means to capture
non-project time to my mind they are not much use when it comes to trying to
model the impact of resources holiday/vacation booked time off work in
advance. I advocate editing resource availability to show a window of time
being unavailable when a resource has booked time off."

To address this, getting the planned time-away on the resource calendars is
the best practice. It automatically affects the project schedules so it has
the highest confidence level in providing a lower likelihood of over
estimating availability. I thought your above statement endorses this. If
this is the case, you can't build your solution using SQL queries as the
calendar data must be obtained through the project object model.

Rick's suggestions were sound, although I disagree that the affects are
surreptitious. The problem is that most users ignore, and click through, the
scheduling warnings they get when they open their project plans.
Unfortunately, unlike unresolved schedule conflicts, these appear once and
never again. I think that any experienced user who know they're in an
environment where resource calendars change without their direct knowledge
who accidentally missed one of these alerts, could easily pickup the cause
for change by using views they would normally be using to analyze the
project on a routine basis.

--


Gary I. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the books on Project Server"
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

For Project Server FAQs visit
http://www.projectserverexperts.com

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[Dominic Moss]

Gary,

Thanks for your useful input - my problem with an Administrative Project is
that booking vacations does not have the same subtle implications as
blocking out time in the Resources Base Calendar. Assigning a resource work
in a window when they are booked to vacation in an Administrative project
will result in the resource being overallocated wherease attempting to
assign a resource to a task when the resource is "Blocked Out" will result
in the task being re-scheduled later in time.

Blocking out time as we agree is the better option in terms of confidence -
from your comments is it definite that a query counting the number of days
when a resource has no work AND no remaining availability cannot easily be
created?

--
Dominic Moss

www.projectability.co.uk

Helping people achieve more with Microsoft Project

Tel +44 8707 303 400
Fax +44 8707 303 500

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Dominic:

Yes, updating the resource calendars is more better.<g>

You can create that report showing those items either from Project, SQL, or
the Portfolio analyzer.

 

[Dominic Moss]

Gary,

Thanks for the response - I will investigate options for reporting
non-availability using the OLAP Cube, I remember Hugues Perron providing
advice on creating a Week Dimension in the OLAP Cube, do you think this
would be useful in such circumstances?

--
Dominic Moss

www.projectability.co.uk

Helping people achieve more with Microsoft Project

Tel +44 8707 303 400
Fax +44 8707 303 500

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

It would be useful if that's the time slice you want to report on.