Project Server 2003 overwriting published EFs

[Stephan Steiner]

Hi

We recently added a bunch of EFs to the timesheet view - all in
writeable form.
However, I then noted that the values set to those EFs via Timesheet
is not consistent.. some changes were lost and the resources reporting
swore that they had made changes. So, I started investigating and
found the reason why this happens:

It seems that the problem only occurs when changes are made while
somebody is working on the project plan.
Further investigation yielded the following results:

If Project Plan A is open in Project Client (and the plan will later
be saved) while a resource is reporting on a task in that project
plan, those changes are only taken into account if the change concerns
only reported time (so far I tried by entering/changing time in the
timesheet.. I did not try with remaining work (which is also writeable
in our timesheet view)). Even if I do change time entered and one of
the EFs concurrently, upon saving the project plan, the changes made
to the EFs are lost, while there is still a pending timesheet update
which holds the change made in hours reported.

We do have a bunch of plans which are rather large and the whole
process of opening them, and re-saving can take up to 20 minutes..
this can happen several times a day. And then there's the approval
process when plans once again are opened and saved.. thus
exponentially increasing the chance that a change falls within a
period where the project is open in the client and thus changes made
to the EFs are being lost - and it seems we're hitting that scenario
regularly.

Is it really supposed to be like that? What's the point of having
resource updateable EFs if those updates are being overwritten by the
project client?

Regards
Stephan

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Stephan --

This behavior usually occurs when the PM publishes the enterprise project
using Collaborate - Publish - Republish Assignments. Are you certain your
PMs are not doing that? Let us know.