Multiple projects with differing Remaining Work

[Jazzman201]

We have a corporate resource pool, and people are assigned to many projects
at once. At present, we have projects retained on the server back to 2005.

Here's my problem: I have a resource who has 7 project assignments back to
2005. All projects are completed, but some show Remaining Work. These 7
projects show 5 different amounts of Remaining Work for this resource, and of
the 5, only 1 is correct. The total of Remaining Work is around 3,500 hours.
It should be closer to 2,000 hours.

I can not simply correct Remaining Work for each project and re-publish the
full plans, because many resources on these projects have left the
organization: our policy is to delete the Winders User Account immediately
when they leave, so I get spooler errors for missing accounts and the changes
have to be backed out.

Even if I open all plans at once, and re-publish New and Changed Assignments
for each, I can't get the Remaining Work numbers to agree. Anyone have any
ideas as to how to fix this??

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

When you say that you delete the windows account, do you mean you delete the
user account in PWA or do you mean that you make the user Project Server
authenticated rather than windows authenticated and then de-activate the
user?

If you are de-activating the user then you can temporarily re-activate the
user in order to synch up the user account on the opened and re-published
projects and then de-activate the user again once you have resolved all the
hours.

Jonathan

 

[Jazzman201]

--
Jazzman201

When you say that you delete the windows account, do you mean you delete the
user account in PWA or do you mean that you make the user Project Server
authenticated rather than windows authenticated and then de-activate the
user?

If you are de-activating the user then you can temporarily re-activate the
user in order to synch up the user account on the opened and re-published
projects and then de-activate the user again once you have resolved all the
hours.

Jonathan

Jazzman201

Corporate Policy requires us to delete the Windows User Account in PWA.
This means the user no longer has an Outlook id as well. Only option I can
think of is to assign a departed resource's Windows User Account to an
Outlook mailbox or similar, so the spooler can continue publishing the plan
without having to back out. Unsure if this solves my original problem,
though.

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

You shouldn't get spooler errors just by having your resources project
server authenticated. The issue is when you de-activate a user, their
account information no longer synchs up with the enterprise resource pool on
project open but when you publish the server picks up differences between
your inactive resource data and the data stored for that resource in the
Enterprise Resource Pool. This is a known issue in 2003. What you need to
do is re-activate the user temporarily so that the data does synch up on
project open and you should not get the spooler errors.

Jonathan

 

[Jazzman201]

Not possible. Authentication does not occur at server level in our shop.
You must have an authenticated Windows id to get to PWA. When a resource
leaves, that id is deleted within 48 hours (corporate policy). Once that
happens, we can't republish the full plan , because the account information
is automatically deleted from the server. Sounds like we will need to create
dummy Windows user accounts for all departed resources or change their
account to a Mailbox id.

There is also a corporate plan to archive all projects from 2004-2006 later
this spring. Will that remove Remaining Work for those archived projects
from the projects remaining on the server?

It appears that Remaining Work is updated only when publishing either All
Information or New/Changed Assignments for all resources in the plan. Is
this accurate?

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

I assumed this was 2003 and not 2007, which is it? You are correct that in
2007, there is no option for project server authentication but in 2003 there
is.

When you say the id is deleted you are referring to the Windows ID, not the
Enterprise Resource Account, correct? Because if the enterprise resource
account is deleted, then that resource account becomes a local resource on
all enterprise projects they were on.

What is the archive process going to entail? Are you going to delete old
projects from the database and put them somewhere offline? If you remove
the projects from the database completely, then the remaining work for those
projects will disappear.

I am not sure I understand your last question. Any changes to the schedule
itself will get updated when doing All Information, New/Changed, or
Re-Publish. Publish Project Plan I believe only publishes limited high
level project information.

Jonathan

 

[Jazzman201]

You're correct that this is Server 2003.

At this moment, I have all plans with a certain individual assigned open.
The Remaining Work figure is correct when I look at Resource Usage view in
any of the plans. However, when any one of the plans is not open, the
Remaining Work figure is off by the amount of Remaining Work that was shown
in the closed plan. This suggests to me that Remaining Work must be retained
on the server, since that's the only place Project could go to find the
project and assignment that's not open.

It's also my understanding that publishing All Information doesn't update
the server's Remaining Work totals, but that selecting a resource and
publishing New/Changed Assignments for that resource only doesn't update the
server either.

When I look at a resource whom I know is no longer here, Project calls it an
Inactive Enterprise Resource. When I look at Resource Information for that
resource, the E-mail id is there but the Windows User Account is blank.

Am I correct is assuming that I can change the Windows User Account for this
resource to a valid one (say, a mailbox) and change the e-mail to the
Mailbox, do this for all such resources, open all the plans for them at the
same time and republish all of them (which option?), and the server would be
updated correctly?

As for the archive, no details yet, but I assume that the plans will simply
be copied to an archive, and then deleted with little other activity. What
would be the impact of that?