Ideas for a Dept Level Application Support

[Thomas Rose]

We have an IT group that supports 50 applications and they wish to capture
support time by application during course of the year. During the course of a
week, any application or combination of applications can have support
requests, so it is different week to week and not predictable. Essentially we
are looking to park the time with appropriate application after the work is
complete.

We are using Project Server 2007 and have investigated the following:

1. Created a Annual Support workplan with a task per application in Project
Pro with the IT group added as Enterprise resources but not assigned to each
task. Problem with this solution was you cannot add Tasks in My Tasks and
adding the tasks to a Timesheet will allow you add only add Summary Task from
the workplan and you cannot import back into My Tasks. Thus Project Mgr of
the workplan never knows you work on that task.

2. Created Activity Plan, but you are forced to enter in duration and assign
resources to each task. You do not know up front what durations or who will
be assigned application support work in advance.

3. We looked at Team Assignments, but it appears that 50 tasks will be open
every week for a team member to sort through and accept, then reocrd time
against. Again we are looking to record time after the fact when support is
already done

Curious if anyone has a better mousetrap for this problem?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Thomas --

Given the choices you present, I would vote for #1, but with a twist. I
would create a Fixed Duration with a long Duration, spanning the remainder
of the year, for example. I would assign the support resources to each of
the 50 tasks at a Units value of 1% per task. This would show that the
support resources are committed to work at least half-time (50%) on support
work and are available half-time to work on projects, assuming that is your
situation with these support staff. If they not available to work on
projects at all, then I would assign them at 2% Units per task to consume
their time completely. This way your support staff will see all of their
tasks on the My Tasks page at all times and can report Actual Work against
any one of these 50 tasks.

Option #2 is totally out of the question. On an Activity plan, when you
assign a resource to a task, the system automatically assigns the resource
at 100% Units and you CANNOT change the Units value. This deficiency
renders Activity plans nearly useless for most organizations.

Option #3 is totally out of the question. I doubt you will find Team
resources any help in this situation at all.

In your situation, I don't think there is an ideal solution, but I have
shared a few thoughts with you. Perhaps the others in the group will share
their ideas with you as well. Hope this helps.

 

[DogLBer]

We are using Dale's approach to cover a very similiar situation. We have
Fixed Duration tasks for the year with all resources assigned at very low %
units and best guessed Work. The resources enter time at the intervals they
work on them. Yes, all the tasks do appear on all resources My Tasks, but
setting the My Tasks to open in a collapsed mode disguises the clutter. BUT,
Start, Finish and Duration move around indiscriminately and as the PM every
week following Updates I correct Task parameters. Except for that caveat, the
method is allowing us to capture and analize effort against these non
scheduled tasks.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

DogLBer --

Thanks for sharing your advice, and for the confirmation about the reply I
gave to this question. Ironically, what we are trying to do is to
"simulate" the Administrative Project type that was available by default in
Project Serve 2003.

 

[Thomas Rose]

Thanks to you both. It is ironic as I came from a PS 2003 environment and
kept looking to do the "old" way.

As a side note for another option, from My Tasks page, I did click on New
and try adding New Task. when I selected the Project from Task Location
section, it would not display Tasks when the Existing Task option was
selected. If it had worked, that could possibly meet the requirement.