Good day RKT,
Unfortunately I cannot help you fix the problem, however I will confirm one
thing to you (fuel for your fire):
1) we have been running MSP Pro & server for over 3 years now, +120 project
managers, +600 timesheets, +600 project plans (first in MSP2002 then MSP2003)
2) we have encountered so many discrepancies between MSP Pro project plans &
timesheets that we built our own application which identifies out of syncs
between project plans & timesheets.
3) Most of the errors are caused by manipulations in the plans, we have
determined that 99.99% of the time the timesheet is accurate and the plan is
the one with the errors:
i- (this is the biggest source of problems that we have and you should
ensure that all your users know this by heart) when project manager change
certain values in the plan they WILL generate actual work without knowing it
(for instance, if in the project plan you change Actual Work, % Complete,
Actual Duration, add a new resource to a task 100% completed with actual
work/0 remaining, or change the finish date on a task that is 100% completed
with actual/0 remaining, any of these changes may either generate new actual
work or change existing actual work). So, our experience is that the PM is
responsible for most of the errors simply by lack of understanding of the
impact of their manipulations on published plans with assigned Enterprise
Resource Pool resources. None of the values mentioned should be changed in
the plan, they should be changed either in the timesheet or by changing the
remaining effort. By the way, publishing with “overwrite actual effort
entered by resources†only masks the problems, it carries the problems
generated in the plan to the timesheets and then you loose the only accurate
data, i.e., what was originally entered by the resources in their
timesheets…to be used with extreme caution.
ii- we are getting situations where time seems to be in an ambiguous state
on the server, not approved, not updated, not saved and it appears in the
timesheet but not in the plan. This is again likely caused by a
mis-manipulation in the plans, we just have not yet sufficiently tested the
problem to find the root cause.
Our SOP (standard operating procedure) for project managers now includes
running our homegrown validation tool on a weekly basis after approving
timesheets, and 20% of our PM's (120 users) seem to be getting errors weekly.
I am not certain if commercial tools exist to produce this type of report,
or you may need to do like us (hire a programmer and get him to build a quick
SQL/VB application that compares events in both databases). Again, as stated,
from experience the data in the timesheets is typically accurate and the data
in the plans is where most of your problems are encountered. As a very
experienced user, your suspicions are founded no matter what anybody else
says…
Good luck to you...
