Best practice for admin projects

[Paul Linscott]

Hi,

We have just setup an admin project to track non-project and non-working
time activities for Q2/2005. At the start of Q3/2005, most likely the same
activities will be tracked. When the Q3 admin plan is activated, the Q2 admin
plan must be deactivated, whereby the users will not see or be able to enter
hours against the tasks, but the plan must still be available by the
controlling team to perform statistics, reporting and record tracking. In
normal projects, the tasks are no longer shown to the users by placing a 0 in
the remaining work column(100% complete). How is this done with admin
projects? If I look at the remaining column in the admin project plan, the
remaining column is already 0 and the tasks still appear in PWA. At the start
of Q3, the users must not see the Q2 admin project.

If someone knows a better way to maintain such activities using a set time
frame, please feel free to let me know.

thx for your tips

Paul

 

[mark.everett]

Paul -

Do some searching in this group and the related one for Admin Projects.
Do not use the Microsoft Project Server method (using the Admin
project switch). Dale Howard provides a step by step in many of the
posts on how to set up an Admin project that will work in most cases,
including yours. The only limition on the way they propose is that
team members must use the "All Tasks" view when needing to enter time
on the Admin project, after the first entry.

To answer the specifics, I would set up my the admin plan and at the
end of the quarter, change the booking type for all resources in the
plan from committed to proposed and republish. This will take it off
their timesheet, but leave it on the server for analysis. Once the
quarter has closed and OLAP has run, there is no reason to keep it on
the server, so the admin plan can be saved as an .mpp for archiving and
the schedule deleted from the server.

Hope this helps.

Mark S. Everett | PMP

 

[Paul Linscott]

Mark -

thx as always. I searched the group and did not find much that could help
me. I must have searched the General group. After re-executing the search on
the server group, I found a lot more. Sorry for the inconvenience. I'll
review all the threads and will get back to the group if things are still
unclear.

cheers

Paul