Admin Time tracking and Project Server

[Larry Singer]

Rookie question:

We are looking at Project Server to help with managing projects and
collecting/reporting all time (admin, vacation, ill, production support,
conferences, training, etc.).

Some of the posts show problems with the standard Admin projects and several
people created projects to track the admin efforts.

Our requirement is to track and report all non-project time as well as
proiect time. Do many organizations rely completely on Project Server for
'40-hour' time reporting? Do they ignore the standard Admin projects? Do
they eventually move to a separate time tracking system for the non-project
time?

Thanks for your responses and opinions.

 

[Guest]

Most of the organizations I have worked with have existing SAP or Peoplesoft
ERP environments. Where this is the case, these systems are used for employee
time tracking and one way or the other drive the company’s payroll system.

When Project Server is added to this kind of environment project team members
are routinely required to enter their activity in both systems. This is
because there is no practical way for an ERP system to collect and insert
enough detailed activity into Project Server. My experience has been that most
ERP environments do not track much more than resource id, time per pay period
and billable task/cost center.

At least one client I support has determined that this is a significant cost
burden and I have proposed to extract actual time from the Project Server for
automated submission to their ERP environment. Microsoft provides solution
starters to help with this kind of integration.

Another client I have worked with used ONLY Administrative projects and
essentially turned the Project Server into their time tracking system.

Administrative projects have their place.

Your starting questions should include:

How big is your company?
Is everyone going to report their time on the project server?
If not, what are the other people doing?
How does your company manage their payroll?

Bob Segrest, PMP
Microsoft Project Blackbelt