Administrative Projects

[dave]

For my employees they do not see the administrative tasks through project web
access. How can they fill out their timesheet against this project if they
do not see it. How does administrative projects differ from regular projects?

thx

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Dave --

You must actually publish the project (Collaborate - Publish - All
Information) before team members can see their task assignments in the PWA
timesheet. Hope this helps.

 

[dave]

Must employees (resources) be assigned as a team member to the administrative
project? Will the project show up along side other projects where they have
been assigned tasks?

thx

 

[dave]

In order for a person to assign time to an administrative project do they
need to use the 'assign myself to an existing task' option through pwa?

thx

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Dave --

The manager of the administrative project must add team members to the
project using Tools - Build Team from Enterprise and then must assign the
resources to the appropriate tasks in the project. He/she must also publish
the project, as I have detailed in the previous post. Hope this helps.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Dave --

Definitely not. Follow the steps in my previous post.

 

[dave]

We are using administrative projects to track holidays, sick time, health
reasons. From what i have read here, i must assign my entire resource pool
to each of those tasks (in the administrative project) in order for the
project to show up along side an individuals other tasks.
The only other way that i can see doing this is require the end user to use
the assign myself to a task not shown here feature.

Am i correct?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Dave --

You are making this process way too hard, and you should definitely not ask
your team members to self-assign themselves to tasks in the admin plan.
Instead, do the following:

1. Open your administrative project
2. Click Tools - Build Team from Enterprise
3. Select all of your human resources and copy them to the project team
4. Click OK
5. Select all of the tasks in the admin plan
6. Click the Assign Resources dialog button
7. Select all of the resources in the dialog and click the Assign button
8. Click the Close button
9. Save and publish your admin project

That's the easy part. The problem you will face using an admin plan for
this purpose is that Project Server will not automatically reschedule
assigned work for resources when they submit nonworking time such as
vacation. For example, if I am assigned to work on tasks in a regular
project during the week between Christmas and New Years, and then I submit
vacation to your admin plan during that time period, Project Server will not
reschedule my task work to the week after New Years. If that is the
behavior you wish to see in Project Server, you should dump your admin plan
and enter each person's vacation on their personal calendar in the
Enterprise Resource Pool. You can't do both, however, so your organization
should make a decision about whether to use an admin plan to track
nonworking time, or to enter nonworking time in the Enterprise Resource
Pool, and then stick with that decision. Hope this helps.

 

[Bella]

Dale,

I believe I read that accepted admin plan tasks will also reduce the
availabiltiy of resources. Where do I see the reduced availability? I looked
in their working calendar and nothing had changed. Did I confuse something
here?
HELP, this is driving me nutty!!!

Thanks,
Bella

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Bella --

As I stated previously, the reduced availability will not show up on the
resource's calendar. Have you tried looking at the View resource
availability option in the Resource Center?

 

[George F]

So if the availability isn't reduced in the schedules, then why not just use
a regular schedule to track non-working time. Is the sole purpose of the
admin schedule to be able to use the notify your manager of non-working days
functionality?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

George --

In addition to the feature you mention, administrative projects also have a
couple of other features that regular projects do not have, including:

1. Users cannot hide tasks in admin projects from their timesheets in PWA
2. Administrative tasks are never considered complete and are always
considered "Current tasks"

If you use a regular project, yo will lose the "Notify your manager..."
feature you mention, plus the above two features as well. Hope this helps.

 

[George F]

It does and thanks. One more question though. What does the "notify your
manager..." feature offered do anything more than an e-mail could? If it
doesn't affect availability (upon approval) and resources still have to enter
their non working time, I assume that it only does notify the manager and
nothing more, right?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

George F --

A couple of points for you to ponder:

1. The "Notify your manager..." feature is used to schedule future Work
hours for nonworking time such as a planned vacation. When a person books a
planned vacation using this feature, the Work hours are scheduled during
that time period in the administrative project (after approval by the PM).
When the person actually takes the vacation, they report the time as Actual
Work on their timesheet, the PM approves, and then the Actual Work is
entered in the administrative project.

2. If you need nonworking time (such as vacation and sick leave) to impact
resource availability, and to reschedule work in projects around the
nonworking time, then the administrative project is not what you should use.
Instead, you should enter the nonworking time on the resource's personal
calendar in the Enterprise Resource Pool. For this purpose, you could
establish a process whereby a resource gets a vacation approved by the
appropriate manager, submits the vacation time to the Enterprise Resource
Pool admin, and the ERP admin then enters the time on the resource's
calendar in the ERP.

Hope this helps.

 

[George F]

Thanks for clarifying. It does help and it's appreciated.

 

[Ann]

I am planning on using an administrative project for vacation time exactly as
described below. However, by the time I have assigned about 15 resources to
the task, I have exceeded the 256 character limit for the resource list. I
am thinking that we need to have many identical administrative projects with
small groups of people assigned to each. Is this the recommended way to do
this? Is there a way around the 256 character limit for the resource list
for administrative projects?

Ann

 

[Jonathan Sofer - MCP]

Ann,

Just because you cannot see or add any more resources in the Resource
Column, does not mean you can't have more resources than that. There are
other ways to add resources to a task.

You can do a Tools>Assign Resources for example and add resources that way.
You can see all the resources that are assigned to a Task by switching to
Task Usage view under Views>

I do not believe there is a limit on how many resources can be on an admin
task. Performance on opening this Admin project might get to be an issue if
you have a lot of assignments and a lot of actual data. What a lot of
companies do is they have an Admin Project for the year and at the end of
the year they close it out and start a new one for the next year.