D
dossmk
I apologise for this very long message. I request your patience.
I inherited a work plan that had been created by breaking a few MS-
Project rules. For example, resources and work had been assigned at
the summary tasks level with the detailed sub-tasks being milestones.
The detailed sub-tasks drove the dates for the summary level. Tasks
were of type Fixed Duration and Fixed Units. The Summary tasks were
all Fixed Duration and the detailed tasks were a mix of Fixed Units,
Fixed Work and Fixed Units. We have a company policy that all tasks
shall only be Fixed Work.
To add to the confusion, the plan had not been baselined and people
already started to enter actuals through PWA at the summary tasks
level.
It has fallen upon me to "correct" the plan and bring it to company
standards.
What I did:
I deleted all the detailed sub-tasks (which were all milestones by the
way). This made all the original summary tasks (to which resources and
work had been assigned) as non-summary tasks. This was a desired
result. Unfortunately what this also did was to change the start dates
to the beginning of the project; and since these (originally) summary
tasks were Fixed Duration, this also changed the Finish dates to the
start date + duration.
This in itself is not much of a problem, I just changed the dates back
to what they were supposed to be. But there were already actuals in
some of these "summary" tasks, therefore when the dates got shifted
back and forth, the actuals for those days got blown away.
This again is not much of a problem since I could always "Adjust
Actuals" in PWA and re-enter everyone's actuals. But... when I look
at the Resource Usage View of the plan (in the left part of the screen
where the resources are listed, I inserted the column "Actual Work"
and I see the total actuals for each resource) the total actual work
for each resource reflects the total actual work they entered,
however, the right part of the screen (where each day's work is shown)
when I look at the actual work, it does not total up to the total
actuals displayed in the left part.
Sorry about not being very clear, let me try to explain differently:
In the Resource Usage View, the right half, the Yellow part, I right-
clicked, unchecked "Work" and checked "Actual Work" so that I can see
the actuals for each day of the week.
In the left half, where the resources are listed, I added the column
"Actual Work".
Now the Actual work dislayed in the left part shoudl equal the sum of
all the actuals dislayed in the right half, right? It does not. The
left half displays the correct figure while the right half totals up
to either zero or some other value significantly less than the left
half.
I tried to see if the actuals got moved to some other period, but
could not find the actuals at all. I even tried to change the
timescale to the "Year" view and checked all years from 199x to 2045,
no actuals anywhere other than 2007 and they were not equal to the
values in the left half.
Any pointers on why this happens?
I could always delete the actuals for those resources and re-create
them from scratch, but then we are talking about 3 weeks' worth of
time entry for a 2000 line plan for about 25 resources.
By the way, after doing all this, I changed all the tasks to "Fixed
Work" and baselined the plan so that I could run the macros to
calculate the cost & schedule performances (again developed in-house).
I inherited a work plan that had been created by breaking a few MS-
Project rules. For example, resources and work had been assigned at
the summary tasks level with the detailed sub-tasks being milestones.
The detailed sub-tasks drove the dates for the summary level. Tasks
were of type Fixed Duration and Fixed Units. The Summary tasks were
all Fixed Duration and the detailed tasks were a mix of Fixed Units,
Fixed Work and Fixed Units. We have a company policy that all tasks
shall only be Fixed Work.
To add to the confusion, the plan had not been baselined and people
already started to enter actuals through PWA at the summary tasks
level.
It has fallen upon me to "correct" the plan and bring it to company
standards.
What I did:
I deleted all the detailed sub-tasks (which were all milestones by the
way). This made all the original summary tasks (to which resources and
work had been assigned) as non-summary tasks. This was a desired
result. Unfortunately what this also did was to change the start dates
to the beginning of the project; and since these (originally) summary
tasks were Fixed Duration, this also changed the Finish dates to the
start date + duration.
This in itself is not much of a problem, I just changed the dates back
to what they were supposed to be. But there were already actuals in
some of these "summary" tasks, therefore when the dates got shifted
back and forth, the actuals for those days got blown away.
This again is not much of a problem since I could always "Adjust
Actuals" in PWA and re-enter everyone's actuals. But... when I look
at the Resource Usage View of the plan (in the left part of the screen
where the resources are listed, I inserted the column "Actual Work"
and I see the total actuals for each resource) the total actual work
for each resource reflects the total actual work they entered,
however, the right part of the screen (where each day's work is shown)
when I look at the actual work, it does not total up to the total
actuals displayed in the left part.
Sorry about not being very clear, let me try to explain differently:
In the Resource Usage View, the right half, the Yellow part, I right-
clicked, unchecked "Work" and checked "Actual Work" so that I can see
the actuals for each day of the week.
In the left half, where the resources are listed, I added the column
"Actual Work".
Now the Actual work dislayed in the left part shoudl equal the sum of
all the actuals dislayed in the right half, right? It does not. The
left half displays the correct figure while the right half totals up
to either zero or some other value significantly less than the left
half.
I tried to see if the actuals got moved to some other period, but
could not find the actuals at all. I even tried to change the
timescale to the "Year" view and checked all years from 199x to 2045,
no actuals anywhere other than 2007 and they were not equal to the
values in the left half.
Any pointers on why this happens?
I could always delete the actuals for those resources and re-create
them from scratch, but then we are talking about 3 weeks' worth of
time entry for a 2000 line plan for about 25 resources.
By the way, after doing all this, I changed all the tasks to "Fixed
Work" and baselined the plan so that I could run the macros to
calculate the cost & schedule performances (again developed in-house).