Steve House said:
In addition to John's comments, Project is a work scheduling application,
NOT an accounting nor time and billing nor payroll application. I'm going
to schedule tasks based on when I need the work done and the length of the
task will be based on the work required, not the payroll periods. In that
sense, the company's pay periods are irrelevant to managing the Project
since from the PM perspective, all you're concerned aobut is when the
company accrues the obligation to pay for some work and how much it's going
to cost - you could care less when the accounting department has to cut the
cheque. Even more so, in many projects some fo the work cost is paid to
hourly workers getting paid every week, other may be every two weeks, other
work may be to salaried workers getting paid on a monthly basis, other work
to casual day workers paid daily, and yet others to contractors getting paid
on completion of the work an acceptance of the dleiverable. So what then?
I think that Steve's assessment of the intended use of Project is
ridiculously narrow; but unfortunately Microsoft seems to agree with him. If
Project proports to do Earned Value Management (which it does) it has to be
flexible as to the ACWP status dates, which obviously is determined by a
companies fiscal calender. It includes the Status Date project field to
accomodate EVM; but it provides no convenient way to reorient the Timescale
to view all data along these bondaries (e.g. the typical 13 period fiscal
calender). This is programming laziness. Obviously we want to view our data
in the same date increments that actual costs are accrued and reported by our
finance departments. For example, it is only natural to want to see time
phased BCWS and BCWP, aligned to the same dates as ACWP will be recorded; but
no, microsoft has concluded that this is not useful, in complete ignorance of
how real project managers work.
To let microsoft off the hook by saying that VBA or other techniques can
provide this fundamental behavior is unacceptable. I use tools because they
make my life easier, not to be forced into becoming a co-developer to make
the thing useful. Project Scheduler 8 by Scitor allows this and virtually
every other real-world data view I have ever wanted, FROM THE MENUS, without
having to customize every view or learn a programming language. The
government is pushing me towards Project, but after experiencing some of
these silly oversights in this product, I will be pushing back like crazy to
continue using Scitor PS8.
-Scott
