Can I prepopulate actual work?

[Bill Cole]

I put together a schedule which I was to publish on Project Server.
By the time I was ready to publish, some resources had begun work on the
project and applied some hours.
So before I published the schedule, I entered some hours in the "Actual
Work" column.
Should this work? This seems to be related to the 'hours out of sync
between Project and PWA" issue that I've
been posting about over the last 2 weeks.

For example, Resource 1 had a task that was 16 hours. By the time I was
ready to published, he had applied 4 hours.
So I entered 4 in the Actual Work column before I published the schedule.
That left Work=16, Actual Work=4, Remaining Work=12.

Initially everything was correct in both Project and the resource's Task
view in PWA

The trouble is that in subsequent weeks, when the resources began using PWA
to enter hours worked, the
Work, Actual Work and Remaining Work hours are out of whack, always by the
number of hours that I had
prepopulated the task with before I initially published it.

In the example above, in week 2 the resource applied 6 hours.
This should have added up to a total of Actual Work=10, Remaining Work = 6.
(Work remained at 16).

What I REALLY get is in Project:

Work = 12, Actual Work = 6, Remaining Work = 6

In PWA the user sees in his Task list:

Work=12, Actual Work = 10, Remaining Work = 2

I also noticed that in Resource Usage view, when I initially prepopulated
the task with the 4 hours, that it had shown 4 hours
for the resource. Once the user began entering his own hours, those are
saved, but the initial 4 that had shown up in
resource view are gone. No hours show up for week 1 in either Project or
PWA.

Was I wrong in trying to prepopulate the Actual Work field? I though any
hours the user subsequently applied would be added
to my initial value for Actual Work, but as you can see it did not work this
way.

How do I fix this now that its screwed up?

Bill

 

[Gary L. Chefetz \(MVP\)]

Bill:

You were wrong if you didn't do it properly. Which would be to enter it in
the task or resource usage view, then Publish, then Republish choosing to
overwrite actual work.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
"We wrote the books on Project Server"
http://www.msprojectexperts.com

For Project Server FAQs visit
http://www.projectserverexperts.com

For Project FAQs visit
http://www.mvps.org/project

-

 

[Bill Cole]

Gary,

Thanks for your input. I tried this and it did indeed correct my problem.
The key was the 'republish overwriting Actual Work". Once this was done any
hours applied to the user's tasks correctly were seen in their timesheet
view.
If this was not done the work/applied work/remaining work was out of whack
between Project, PWA and what it should have been, after the Project manager
tweaked the applied hours.

Bill