Yearly Project

S

S. Persoon

Hello All,
I am trying to set up a yearly regular project for a customer to manage
their non-project activities. We do not want to use Admin projects because of
the known issues on Admin projects. Therefore I want to set up a yearly
project per department on which resources can book their vacation, sickness,
meetings hours.

When resources start to book actuals MS Project reschedules the plan over
the end of a year. I do not know if it is possible but is there anybody who
knows how to prevent MS Project to reschedule the duration of 1 year for such
a project (perhaps with a specific constraint?)? Even not going over the end
date would help a lot.

Hope to hear from anybody soon and in advance thanks for your response.

Regards,
Sylvester Persoon.
 
D

Dale Howard [MVP]

Sylvester --

Did you make all tasks in the project Fixed Duration tasks? Let us know.
 
S

S. Persoon

Hello Dale,

First of allt hanks for the reply. Second: Yes I made all tasks fixed
duration and non-effort driven. All tasks have a start date of 1-1-2006 and a
finish date of 12-31-2006. For me it seems logical that if a resource starts
to book actuals on a task in the plan on e.g. April 1 MS Project reschedules
the plan (start date becomes 4-1-2006, finish date becomes 4-1-2007) because
I set the task type to fixed duration. But this is the behaviour that I want
to prevent. I want to task not to finish later than 12-31-2006. Any ideas?

Regards,
Sylvester.
 
S

S. Persoon

Hello All,

It seems like I have found a solution for this rescheduling behaviour. What
I did is the following.

1. Created a normal project (no admin-project!)
2. Task type: fixed duration non-effort driven
3. Finishdate 31/12 2006
4. Duration 256 days (constraint is: Finish no earlier than)
5. Set up two tasks: Vacation and Illness
6. Vacation had 200 hours budget, illness 0 hours

I assigned a resource to both tasks and booked some actuals on them,
approved them and updated them into the project plan.

MS Project reschedules the tasks because the resource does not book his
first actuals on January the first, but e.g. April 1st. Next thing I did is I
changed the task type to fixed work and changed it back to fixed duration.
The finish date is now 31/12 again. No on every futher update the finish date
stays 31/12. That is exactly what I want. So with a little work arround it
seems possible.

If anybody has another idea or solution, please let me know. I am always
interested if I can do it better.

Thanks and regards,
Sylvester Persoon.
 
R

RickD

The problem with using a real project for tracking non-project time is that
you have higher project plan administration if you are using managed
periods. Not only that, you will foreever be getting "Unsubmitted timesheet"
messages whenever a resource did not have to book any time to the tasks. To
minimize admin effort, define the tasks as 1 day, assign your resources to
the tasks as required with 0%. Switch to the Task Usage view and then put a
"bank account" of hours at year end. Your resources will only have to report
actual time when needed. As PM you will need only to manage the "bank
accounts". If the bank accounts go to zero, the task will be considered
complete and disappear off timesheets. (View All Tasks will circumvent the
issue though).

Downside of this method: it overstates your resource forecast for December.
 
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