Process Advice needed

[Steve Lundwall]

Realizing that Project and Project Server are not good 'HelpDesk' tools,
nonetheless, I have been directed to attempt to create a business process in
which significant help desk items are assigned to an overall Help Desk
Project as tasks. That being the case, (we use the daily hours tracking
method) is there a way to prevent a task from appearing complete simply
because the developer resource reports time against it that matches the
estimated time? We want our QA person to test the 'fix' and say it is
acceptable.

Would this require assigning two resources to each task - the developer
resource for a big chuck of time and the QA resource for a very small chuck
of time? What we don't want happening is if in the original review it is
estimated to take 10 hours, that if someone - anyone - reports at least 10
hours that it appears 'completed'.

Thanks.

Steve

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Steve --

You must make this a training and performance issue with your help desk
staff. Train them never to allow the Remaining Work value to reach 0 hours
until that task is actually complete. If the Remaining Work value is 0
hours after entering work on a task that is not yet completed, then the team
member should increase the Remaining Work to a value greater than 0 hours to
keep the task as a "Current Task" on the team member's timesheet. When the
task is finally completed, the team member should set the Remaining Work to
0 hours if needed. Teach them how to do this and then hold them accountable
for their performance. Hope this helps.

 

[Marc Soester]

Hi Steve,

As you already suggested, PS03 is not a support tracking tool. A work
arround is to create a Support project and assign your support team to the
tasks. If you dont want the task to appear completed you could assign another
resource that should be able to set the task into a complete state. The
problem there is, if you have set a task to 10 hours work ( 8 to one resource
and 2 to another resource), and resource 1 has entered 10 hours, the task
will appear completed, independently of the other resource having entered
their time.

I think you will need to use the "remaining work" field

If the task is not completed, your staff could set the "remaining work"
within their timesheet to reflect the outstanding work, meaning that the task
will not be completed until the remaining work is set to 0. ( a task will
only be completed if remaining work is set to 0). This may solve your
problem. May not be the nicesest process, but a good work arround.

Hope this helps

 

[Steve Lundwall]

Marc and Dale,

Thank you both for your replies. Yes, this is pretty much what I figured I
would have to do. In the long run we have Remedy in the two year budget
which of course does interface with Project specifically for Help Desk
functionality. But, for a while, we will need to use the work around.
Typically, around here, what start out as seemingly small help desk items
blow up into full fledge projects, hence the reason they want to start them
with some kind of 'task' in Project.

Thanks again.

Steve