PMs to Read Only in Projects the are Team Members

[crizco]

I found an older posting that describes how to make a PM's permission to read
only in projects they are team members of. I've followed the steps as in the
link below:

http://www.projectserverexperts.com/Shared Documents/Read-OnlyAccessForPMTeamMembers.htm

However, our PM role can still save to other people's schedules. The first
part of the article is easy to understand, bu the second part needs more
clarification. It says to modify the MY Tasks in the PM group to Allow Open
Project. What about the rest of the permissions for My Tasks? Not sure what
I'm doing wrong. Please help!

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

crizco --

The steps are correct and do not need more explanation. You only need to
set the Open Project permission to allow for the My Tasks category in the
Project Managers group. Nothing else needs to be set to either Allow or
Deny. While you are modifying the Project Managers group, click the My
Organization category and check the permissions in the Permissions grid.
Make sure that the Open Project and Save Project permissions are set to Not
Allowed (neither Allow or Deny is selected). That is probably the reason
why your PM's can open and save everyone else's projects. Hope this helps.

 

[crizco]

Hi Dale

Our organization is very customized with Project Server so this may be my
issue and it's a needle in a haystack. We've created our own security
templates for each role that have their own set of category permissions and
global permissions.

The PM role has multiple categories that have the open and save permission
allowed. I went only to the My Tasks in the PM Group and turned off all the
category permissions for allowing the Open Project option (global remains as
is). We don't assign PMs the Orgnanization catagory so that's never been
granted. Wierd thing is, the test ID I'm using only show some projects now in
Project Centre but they are assigned to 2 other ones that aren't showing up
(they don't own any projects but are a PM that is on the team of 4 projects).
But the ones that do show up, I can still open and save a project. Any
thoughts? The categories I have for our PMs (some are customized) are My
Resources, My Costs, My Earned Value, My Projects, My Stoplights, and My
Tasks. All have open and save project except for My Tasks.

 

[crizco]

Sorry, to clarify (I re-read and it sounds a bit confusing), I have all
category permissions as normal with open and save allowed, the My Tasks was
the only one I altered by turning everything off except for Allow Open
Project.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

crizco --

Given your highly customized environment, I'm not sure I can troubleshoot
your issues remotely. Sorry.

 

[crizco]

Hi Dale

Just to give you a head's up on this. I believe the workaround in the
article worked all along but we had an issue with the specific user profile I
was testing.

What gave me trouble (and I really can't understand this) is I changed one
of our Admin user profiles to a PM profile. When I went into the PM group and
changed My Tasks to allow Open Projects only, I could see only 2 out of the 4
projects they were originally a team member of (when they used to be Admin).
When I allowed to view Projects in Project View and PRoject Centre from the
My Tasks category, I saw the other 2 projects that were missing - totalling
the correct 4. The 2 that were missing correctly opened as read-only,
however, the other 2 that always showed up (no matter if I turned Project
Centre/View off or on from My Tasks category) were always editable. I then
opened these 2 "editable" projects under my admin ID (not the user I was
testing) and republished their assignments.

Then I went back to the PM profile that we were using and they couldn't open
the project they previously could anymore. So it worked! I'm wondering if
there was some issue switching an Admin profile to a PM profile and the odd
project that had them assigned previously seemed to see "think" they were
still admin - even though the permissions were set to lock them out of
editing projects they were a team member of. The reason I think the other 2
projects behaved as read-only all along was the Admin profile was already
changed to a PM when they were added to the team. So now I fixed it (by
republishing the projects that had them stuck on edit), but I don't have a
real sound answer as to why that happened.