Showing Task dates as a Project field

M

Michael Blackburn

We use several standardized milestones in our templates, such as "Project
Kickoff", "Requirements Complete" and "Go Live". We would like to see the
dates of those milestones in the Project Center views. My current approach
has been to try to create an Enterprise Custom Project Field which "sucks"
that value out of the task level to the Project level. Anyone else had this
issue, or any ideas for an alternate approach?
 
M

Michael Blackburn

The parent question needs some elaborate the business intentions behind it:
There are tasks which are part of the project process, usually at the
beginning and end, which are important to note, but aren't really important
as far as measuring performance is concerned. I'm talking about preliminary
tasks, such as project planning, funding approval, requirements analysis, and
wrapup tasks, such as project reviews, Lessons Learned, etc. They are mostly
bureaucratic and/or administrative. As is their nature, they sometimes
present significant delays.

If we calculate our development team's performance based on total project
duration (Start_Date and End_Date of the project), those tasks can
significantly impact metrics, and we don't want to measure our performance
based on that. We really want to focus our metrics on the piece of the puzzle
within our control (which are marked with the standardized milestones
mentioned above), while keeping track of the progress of those tasks.

A couple Ideas I've had are:
* Create a subproject with just the "important" tasks
* Create an Enterprise field to flag the "core" tasks
* Create an enterprise field to flag the milestones

All of those seem to be overly complicated. has anyone else faced this
issue, and how did you deal with it, using project server or otherwise?
Thanks,
Michael Blackburn
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

Michael --

My suggestion would be that you only include deliverable tasks in your
regular projects, and then you can measure performance against the tasks
whose schedule you can actually control. Concerning those non-deliverable
tasks, you might use another regular project for them, but set it up like an
Administrative project. This way, you can track the non-deliverable tasks.
Just a thought. I trust others will share their ideas as well.
 
M

Michael Blackburn

Thanks Dale.
I'm somewhat limited in my ability to change our policies regarding what's
to be included in a project schedule. At this point I'm pretty much expected
to be able to do this type of reporting: on a segment of the project, rather
than on the whole project. If there's no other way around it, I can let the
powers that be know but at this point they see it as my problem, not theirs.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of reporting: measuring
duration/effort variance on just a portion of their projects?
 
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