How Project is processing administrative time?

[Daniel]

Hi all,
My company wants the team members to enter vacations forecast so that the
time appears as unavailable for project assignments.
So in the administrative time page I created a new category called
“Vacations forecast†which appears in the timesheets.
But now, I don’t know what to do with it. Is it possible to automatically
enter it as an exception in the resources calendar? Or what is the best use I
can do with it in order this time appears as unavailable for project
assignments.

Daniel

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Daniel --

First of all, I am curious why you didn't simply use the built-in Vacation
category for Administrative time that ships with Project Server 2007. It
seems like you are going to extra work you do not need to do. Regardless,
when you created the new Vacations Forecast category of Administrative time,
did you remember to specify it as Nonworking time? If so, what your users
need to do to submit a vacation forecast is to navigate to the My Timesheets
page and click the Plan Administrative Time button. In the Administrative
Time dialog, they need to select the Vacation Forecast category, select the
time period for the planned vacation, and then enter 8h for each day of
planned vacation on the Planned line in the calendar grid. When they click
the Save button, the Administrative time request goes to their designated
Timesheet Manager. You DID set up a Timesheet Manager for each user, yes?
And when the Timesheet Manager approves the planned vacation, the system
enters the vacation on the resource's calendar as nonworking time in the
Enterprise Resource Pool. After all of this, the system will show that the
user is not available for project work during his/her vacation. Hope this
helps.

 

[Daniel]

Thanks for your help. I will test it right away.
Actually, we can use a built-in Vacation category as well, but it appears
to me more relevant to create a Vacation Forecast category because it’s
mostly about forecast. The problem is, people are asked to enter theirs
vacations time using another software and this software do not consider the
forecast possibilities. So it’s kind of complicated, because I have to
export the real vacations from the other software and then import them to
Project using a VBA script. I’m not sure it’s the best solution, but we don’t
want the team members to enter their vacations twice.
We have no Timesheet Manager. It’s an automatic approval. We are in an
evaluation process regarding the use of project server so for now we try not
to complicate the process.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Daniel --

If you are going to use the Vacation Forecast category, I would recommend
you hide the Vacation category on the My Timesheet page. You find this
option on the same page in PWA in which you set up the Vacation Forecast
category. And, you are more than welcome for the help, my friend!