Approval of administrative tiem

[Andrew Stokes]

Hi

When approving planned administrative (Vacation etc.) there seems to be
little detail available for the the approver to make a valid judgement on
approval.

Say for instance I submit planned administrative time for a vacation which
requires approval. The approver only sees the start and end dates, category
description and resource name. This seems to give little insight into what
needs approving.

Is there any way to give some more detail to the approver e.g. hours
requested for each day. If a resource requests 1 day of vacation in a week
the approver won't know on which day the vacation is planned.

Regards

Andy

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Andy --

By default, the Administrative Time page (from which managers can approve
administrative time requests), contains the following fields:

Resource
Description
Category Title (such as Vacation)
Hours
Period Start
Period End

From the Period Start, Hours, and Period End fields, the approver should be
able to figure out how much time and when. On the other hand, I think we've
found another bug in Project Server. In my test, I entered information in
the Description field while creating the Vacation request. Unfortunately,
the approver sees nothing in the Description field on the Administrative
Time page. Beyond the information I reference above, I doubt there's
anything more available for approvers to use to determine whether to approve
or reject an Administrative Time request. Hope this helps.

 

[Andrew Stokes]

Hi Dale

Thanks for your helpful reply as usual,

I noticed the hours field on the approval page (sorry I forgot to put this
in my original post). The problem with just hours rather than a more
detailed breakdown is… say for instance I requested 1 day out of a week’s
timesheet period for vacation, my approver wouldn't know which day, just that
it is 8 hours being requested. This doesn't allow for the approver to make a
judgement about whether the request will clash with the requirements of the
business (meetings, customer visits etc.). Maybe a data view would give some
more detail.

I was thinking of using the description field to display a little more
detail (e.g. Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon vacation request.) but if you
say that this data isn’t displayed because of a bug I’ll skip that idea.

Regards

Andy

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Andy --

Ask someone to submit Administrative Time and to include some descriptive
data in the Description field, and then submit it. Do YOU see the
Description info? I certainly don't and think it is a bug. Let me know
what you find.

 

[Andrew Stokes]

Hi Dale

I think I'm being a bit stupid here, I assumed that the dates visible were
the timesheet periods (7 days in our case) but looking at it the dates are
the start and end of the requested vacation (e.g. Monday - Wednesday). This
makes the approval request somewhat more useful.

As far as the Description field is concerned, it doesn't show on our PS
setup either, obviously, as you said, a bug in Project Server.

Regards

Andy

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Andy --

Thanks for confirming this. I submitted this as another bug.

 

[Alistair]

As an aside, if you pre-create a timesheet and populate it with
vacation time and a description (rather than using the Plan
Administrative Time functionality), the manager will see the
description in the approval screen (but unfortunately will not see the
number of hours requested).

So it seems that either you are missing an important piece of
information required to approve the timesheets.