Entering Zero for non-worked hours?

[Anthony]

I remember reading here that its good practice to enter zero on time sheets
for days where no hours were worked rather than leaving the fields blank. Is
there a more important/justifiable reason behind this (i.e. data integrity)?
My client is giving some push back on having their employees enter zero for
non worked days. They also asked if someone was on vacation for two weeks,
does that mean that someone has to add two weeks worth of zeros to the
timesheets rather than leave them blank?

Thanks

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Anthony --

Yours is a good question. Thanks for asking. I am one of those who
recommends entering 0h on an in-progress task when no Actual Work was
performed during a time period. Therefore, consider the following scenario:

I am assigned to work full-time on a 40-hour task beginning on Monday and
ending on Friday. I worked 8 hours on this task on Monday and 8 hours on
Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday I was pulled off this project to to
perform work that is not part of any other project. On Friday, I worked 8
hours again on the original project. How should I enter actuals for the
week? There are two choices:

1. I can enter 8 hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday only, and the system
will leave blanks in the cells for Wednesday and Thursday. When the PM sees
the update on his/her Updates page in PWA, the timsheet will show actuals on
Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, with blanks on Wednesday and Thursday. When
the PM updates the task update into the Microsoft Project plan, the system
will enter 8 hours on Monday, 8 hours on Tuesday, 0 hours on Wednesday, 0
hours on Thursday, and 8 hours on Friday. The Gantt Chart will show a task
split where no work was performed on Wednesday and Thursday.

2. I can enter 8 hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday only, and 0 hours on
Wednesday and Thursday. I can also enter a Note on the task to document the
reason for performing no work on those two days. The PM will be able to see
the hours on each day on the Updates page and will be able to read my task
Note to be able to understand why I performed no work on those two days.
After updating the task update into the Microsoft Project plan, the result
will be identical to the result in option #1.

Of the two, I much prefer option #2 because the reporting is explicit and
nothing is left to doubt. The addition of the task Note is important and
should not be ignored. Obviously, I could have added a task Note in option
#1 above, but if your client thinks it is too much work to put a 0 in a cell
on the timesheet, I presume it would be way too much work to add a Note
also.

Regarding your section question about vacation, the Resource Pool
administrator should enter those 2 weeks of vacation as nonworking time on
the resource's personal calendar in the Enterprise Resource Pool, and add a
Note to document the reason for the nonworking time. The next time a PM
opens any project in which the vacationing resource is assigned to tasks
during the 2 weeks of vacation, the system will automatically reschedule
that person's uncompleted work in the project until after the vacation.
After the PM publishes the latest schedule changes, the system will
reschedule the resource's work on his/her PWA timesheet as well. Hope this
helps.

 

[mark.everett]

Anthony -

I just researched that for my client because they had published some 1
day duration tasks with resource assignments, then later zeroed the
planned work out. This left the task on the timesheet, in the current
tasks view. The PM changed remaining work to zero and republished a
couple of times, but it didn't work. The PM put in 1 hour, then
changed it to 0 hours and that worked.

In researching that, I read that in cases like that, due to a bug,
Project Server reads the zero hours as null and not zero and doesn't
process the request. There is a hot fix that is included in SP2a. KB
Article Number 895120 for the client and KB Article Number: 897706 for
the server.

As far as the second part goes - vacation time: Are they not tracking
vacation? If someone is on vacation for two weeks, that is potentially
a lot of work NOT getting done, so they would probably want to deal
with that using the Admin plan or by having someone adjust the resource
calendar. If they use the Microsoft Admin plan, that will put planned
work for "Vacation" and then the resource would record time against the
planned work.

Hope this helps.

Mark S. Everett | PMP
www.quantumpm.com

 

[Anthony]

Thanks for both answers. My client is using MS Project server strictly for
time tracking purposes right now. We have defined an enterprise calendar, but
not for each resource; they all use the same Standard calendar. For this
particular project, they are implementing it on an exisiting plan that wasnt
even built right. Its been a nightmare to clean the plan and get this up and
running. We suggested other options, but they wanted it now and we aren't
using 10% of what it can or was designed to do. None of them had any prior
experience with project server and neither did I. Between this forum and the
book Microsoft Project Server 2003 Unleashed, I have learned a
ton...sometimes in a very painful and long hours way. This has been a
learning experience all around, but if I got hit by a bus today, they would
be screwed as I am the only person from my firm on this project with any
knowledge right now of how this works. This forum has been a lifesaver.