Important Question - Schedule Update

[Rami]

Hi

As you know when the resource changes the remaining availability and submit
the task for approval, it will reach the project manager as a new update.

How can the project manager know that this update will affect the schedule
since the duration now became longer? Imagine a project manager diving in a
big project plan and getting hundreds of updates each day. Is there any
indicator that can tell him if there is a change on the duration?

Thanks

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Rami --

I am teaching a class at this very moment where I taught the students how to
handle this situation. You must make this a training and performance issue
with your team members. Teach them that when they adjust the Remaining Work
estimate, they MUST add a Note to the task stating the Remaining Work BEFORE
they changed it, the Remaining Work AFTER they changed it, and the REASON
for making the change. Otherwise, there is no direct way to know they
changed the Remaining Work. You can use the indirect method after
processing the task update by examining the Work table in the Microsoft
Project plan, and looking for any task whose % Work Complete is less than
100% and whose Variance is greater than 0 hours. Hope this helps.

 

[Rami]

Dear Dale

Thanks for your continuous help in this group.

I proposed the same thing for my client but I think Microsoft should
consider this issue in the new version. It costs them nothing if they add
this feature.

Regards

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Rami --

You are more than welcome for the help, my friend!

Regarding the feature set of Project Server 2007, I strongly suspect that
the feature set is now locked as it is in public beta 2 right now. I don't
disagree with your desire for this feature, however.

 

[John Sitka]

Rami consider this.
Include an Enterprise Custom Task Field of type Duration.

I called mine ecf_Orig_Work_Estimate ( it fits in the Enterprise Duration 1 column)
Include this and the work column in a custom view, put the two columns next to each other.
When building tasks after the original work value is entered (or calculated) copy that to you new non calculated Custom Duration
Field.
the variance between the two means something has changed, a negative variance means somebody is planning on taking longer than you
originally thought.
That negative variance can be place in other views (or the same one) as yet another Enterprise Custom Task Field of type Duration
based on the formula [Enterprise Duration1]-[Work] and be displayed as a flag White dot = no change, Green dot = gain, Red dot =
loss. In other words it is a, per task baseline without using baselines which you might want to save for use as a longer range
multiple snapshot evaluation metric.