Mysterious Actuals

[J Burford Fields]

One of our project managers, reviewing her time entered in PWA, found
time charged to a task on which she has never worked. The task only
apears in PWA, for her, because I added her as a resource to all tasks
on that project at a 0% level of effort so that she might adjust
remaining hours, someday in the future.

The hours that she is seeing had to have been entered by another
resource.

The only thing that I think might explain this behavior is that it was
discovered that she had created some additional tasks, in the same
project, that weren't authorized after the project was baselined.
Those tasks were deleted. We later learned that resources had entered
time against them, but there was no warning message. Probably the task
owner, or the person who republished and became a task owner, had not
accepted the time entries prior to the task deletion, but did so later.

While it took unusual circumstances to create this, it is not good that
time entered by anyone else should ever show up in ones own actuals.

Any thoughts?

 

[Marc Soester]

Hi J Burford Fields,

I am not sure if I agree with your statement, since I have never experienced
this behaviour before. I also dont think that ones users timeentry shows up
in another users time entry.

First, I would check if there is a difference between "actual work" and
"actual work protected".
It could well be that the project plan has been updated with Actual work
from the Project managers possibly. You can see this by comparing both values
for the resource of actual time and actual time protected. ( actual time
protected will use the time enterd in a timesheet).

If both values should be the same, I would go into the timesheet of the
actual user who has the problem and would check if you can see the value in
the timesheet of this user. If this is the case, chances that he/she actually
updated the timesheet ( maybe mistakenly) is pretty high.

Alternetafly someone else may have entered time for the resuorce under
"adjust actuals" within the resource tab. Which I would check as well.

You can see there are many variations to why time is in a project plan, you
will need to invetigate why this is the case.

I hope this helps you investigate why the actuals do not appear as you
expect them to. Please let me know if you have any questions.

 

[J Burford Fields]

Thanks Marc,

I'm about the only one who adjusts actuals. Yes, she might have been
mistaken, in entering time, but she does not think so. While there
have been other operator errors, this one would be pretty far out in
Left Field. Not much reason for her to go near those tasks.

J

 

[J Burford Fields]

I took another look at this. The scenario seems to have played out
just like I wrote it.

If I want to see a journal log of time submissions, where would I look?

J

 

[Marc Soester]

Hi J,
Sorry there is no journal log as such in 2003, you will have to wait until
2007 which will provide a log

 

[J Burford Fields]

Thanks, Marc.

Nevertheless, I had a worthwhile learning experience. The doc files in
the doc folder of the application cd are very interesting.

J