Inactive Enterprise Resources warning message question...

[Jennifer L]

Upon opening certain projects in MS Project Professional 2007 I continue to
receive the warning message that my… “inactive resources still have remaining
work and that I should reassign that work to an active resource.†However, I
have made sure that those tasks assigned to the inactive resources are marked
100% complete. They are done – there is no remaining work to be reassigned. I
have even gone back into the Resource Center in Project Server, switched
these resources from ‘inactive’ to ‘active’, then opened the project in MS
Project Pro 2007 (when the resource is set to active I do not get the warning
message), made sure the tasks were updated, saved and published the project,
checked-in the project, cleared my cache and exited the application. I then
made the resources ‘inactive’ again (as they should be), opened the app and
the project, but still got the warning message about my inactive resources.

Is there a way to make these warning messages go away? This gets especially
annoying when opening the Master project, as there are inactive resources on
multiple projects. Have I not done all there is to do to ensure that the work
is showing as complete on these assignments? Please let me know if there’s
something I’m missing. Any help is appreciated.

Thank you!
Jennifer

 

[Jonathan Sofer [MVP]]

Hi Jennifer,

I think this issue has to do with a combination of two things. One of them
being a log-in setting and the other being a bug in the tool. Let me try
and explain.

1) When you log into project professional, by default, there is an option
enabled called "Load Summary Resource Assignments" which will show a summary
line item in the usage views represeting all other work the resource has
scheduled on other projects. If you never changed your project account
settings to "Manually control connection state", you won't even see where
you can disable "Load Summary Resource Assignments". To change your
connection state to manual go to Start>Programs>Microsoft Office>Microsoft
Office Tools>Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 Accounts. The next time
you log in you will see a pop up log in screen and two new options on the
bottom.

2) There is an identified bug in Project 2007. The bug is described as
followed:

a) Open Project Pro with "Load Summary Resource Assignments" checked.
b) Open a project schedule and using Resource Usage view, find a resource
that has work assigned to Other Projects and commitments.
c) Add the actual work and remaining work columns to the view.
d) The "Remaining Work" is not being calculated correctly, it is always set
to the same value as is displayed in the "Work" column.

So you can see that an inactive resource that incorrectly shows the "Work"
value in the "Remaining Work" field could cause this incorrect pop up error
message about inactive resources still having remaining work when in fact
they don't.

My recommendation to you is to disable "Load Summary Resource Assignments"
and see if that fixes your issue. If it does fix the issue then avoid using
this option. Currently, there is no plan to fix this bug until the next
version of Project Server.