Multiple Administrative projects

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hi,
Is it possible to have 2 "Administrative" projects:
- One classical for resources absences
- One for recurrent work such as IT maintenance

Where the resources absences notifications will be dispatched ?

Thanks

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Bonjour Gerard --

Yes, you can have multiple Administrative projects for different purposes.
Not sure what you mean by "dispatched" your second question, however.
Please say more about that. Hope this helps.

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Bonjour Dale,
Et merci encore,

I was asking for confirmation that when the resource clicks the "Notify your
manager of time you will not be available for project work." link, and the
Manager accepts and "Updates", the system will find the good Administrative
project.

Thanks a lot,

Gérard Ducouret

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Gerard --

The system will send the nonworking time or the IT maintenance time to the
correct manager of the correct Administrative project. Hope this helps.

 

[Mike]

Gerard

If you have administrative projects this function should be turned off
(set "Change Work Days" to deny). It will mess up admin plans.
Administrative plans should not be used for "planning", only for
collecting time.

regards

Mike

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Mike --

Thanks for your opinion on this subject, although it is only an opinion.
There are definitely two schools of thought "out there" on how to track
nonworking time such as vacation and sick leave, and how to use
Administrative projects. One school of thought says that Administrative
projects can be used for capturing nonworking time, since doing so makes it
easy to report on all instances of nonworking time during a certain period
of time. The same school of thought says that Administrative projects can
be used to capture unplanned work, as well. You see this school of thought
reflected in Gerard's original question, in which he has two administrative
projects, one for capturing nonworking time such as vacation and sick leave,
and another for capturing unplanned work.

The second school of thought is what our company, msProjectExperts,
officially recommends to our clients. We recommend that planned nonworking
time, such as vacation and personal days off, should be entered on each
resource's personal calendar in the Enterprise Resource Pool. Doing so will
cause Project Server to automatically reschedule project tasks for each
resource's instance of nonworking time in each project to which they are
assigned. This is a powerful advantage, but the down side is that it is
very labor intensive for whomever has to enter each nonworking time
instance. We further recommend that Administrative projects only be used
for capturing unplanned work and for unplanned nonworking time, such as sick
leave.

My only disagreement with you is that you stated your opinion as if it were
a fact. Hope this helps.

 

[Mike]

Hi Dale

Sorry for the delay in responding to your last note, have been busy,
but at the risk of being controversial....

In my experience using this option screws up administrative plans. It
effectively creates a planning assignment in the future. The purpose
of administrative plans is solely to capture time. Incidently this
view is supported by the Microsoft Application guide (Chapter 11) which
says:
"Deny the Change Work Days global permission at the organizational
level. This
prevents individual team members from being able to define their own
non-project
days and non-working days when they are using an administrative
project".

So not just my opinion

Just to add a little more fuel to the fire..rather than making changes
to resource calendars my preference is to create "Absence Plans" -
essentially creating tasks and assignments suitabley labelled whenever
a resource request an absence. This provides a much simpler interface
and can be operated by less skilled admin staff. Within this plan it
is a simple matter to set up usage views which group on the absence
code
and resource name. This provides analysis and easy awareness of
non-availability. Changes in the resource calendar cannot be viewed or
understood in a similar manner (limited interface). In addition this
approach enables valuable analysis from olap driven views.

You can of course get super sophisticated and combine both techniques.
To do this you have to add a couple of columns to the view in the
absence plan - "task calendar", and "Ignore Resource", then set task
calendar=standard, and Ignore Resource = Yes for each task, allowing
you to "plan work" when the resource is not available.

Dale I have the greatest respect for msProjectExperts and the work you
do in the newsgroup but all any of us have to offer is our opinion
(hopefully informed).

regards

Mike

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Mike --

Thank you for quoting the Microsoft documentation. Unfortunately, it is
wrong. As I stated earlier, your opinion is an opinion and nothing more.
As I stated, there are TWO schools of thought on the use of administrative
projects. You happen to support one of them, but there are two. Hope this
helps.