Actual Work hrs differ between My Tasks and Res. Cent. View Assign

[Jeff Johnson]

After our employees' timesheets are approved, the correct number of total
hours on each project to date appears under their My Tasks page. However,
when we attempt to "View Assignments" under the Resource Center page, the
'Actual Work' hours are not the same (often off by hundreds of hours). Does
anyone know why only the My Tasks page would correctly show the number of
hours entered by employees via their approved timesheets?
Also, when viewing the projects in MS Project Client, the Actual Work
hours are not being updated either. Any clues how to make the My Tasks
worked hours jive with the Actual Work hours used elsewhere in MS Project?
We're currently pursuing the idea that republishing each Project from the
Client side will help rectify this, but it's not clear that will work.

Thanks,
Jeff Johnson
USGS

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

You must publish the project plans after you approve the timesheet hours
from My Tasks into the project plan. This is required to make sure
everything stays in sync. If you are not publishing the projects after
accepting all the My Task hours, this would be a reason why your Assignments
views are not showing the correct actuals.

Also, make sure you are not getting any errors in the queue.

Jonathan

 

[Jeff Johnson]

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks very much, that got us back on track! We hadn't been
consistently selecting all tasks in the My Tasks page and clicking on the
"Submit Selected" button. Once that was done, those changes appeared as
Approvals in the approver's home page. Once those Approvals were accepted,
we could see the updates within the project in question when we opened it
with the MS Project Client. After publishing those changes for that project,
the View Assignments page in the Resources Center indeed showed the updates!

The next question is whether there is a way to automatically publish the
changes made after the Approvals are accepted. We have about 60 individual
projects in our group, and opening/publishing each of those on a weekly basis
would quickly become tedious. Is there a server setting somewhere that will
allow automatic publishing, e.g., via the Collaborate option on the Client
side?

Thanks again for the help,
Jeff Johnson
USGS

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

Jeff,

There is no option like that out of the box. The tool is really designed to
get feedback from the PMs after updates are accepted so the PM gets a chance
to review the impacts of the updates to their schedules and make the
appropriate adjustments before re-publishing the plan out to the server for
all the organization to see.

But I understand that there seems to be new features in the tool that make
it easier to accept updates into the schedule without seeing the impact and
so you would think that MS would finish this out with the ability for the
data to be published back out automatically.

Since that is not the case, I would suggest that you either implement a
governance report that shows all projects publish vs. saved dates and
implement a weekly process that involves reviewing the schedule, updating
the Status Date and publishing.

Or you can write a macro that will on a periodical basis, during off hours
open each project plan and re-publish it out. There are several references
out there on the microsoft.public.project.developer group but if you can't
find them, let me know and I will see if I can dig an example up for you.

Jonathan