Project Server 2007: Approval Tasks and Publish Projects

[andysager]

What is the best practice method for approving tasks and publishing
projects with Project Server 2007? Should the task approvals and
publishing be completed via Project Web Access, or should both be
performed via Project Pro 2007?

Thanks!

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

1) Approve tasks in PWA - which gives you the opportunity to review each
update before accepting.
2) Open Project, review, edit, and publish.

Publishing from PWA has been a bit buggy in the past, and is generally not
recommended.

-A

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

sandysager --

I'll give you a "second opinion" to the one that Andrew gave you. Our
company recommends as a "best practice" that you always approve pending task
updates in the Project Professional 2007 client. If you open a project that
has pending task updates, the software informs you of this, and gives you
the opportunity to view and approve the updates. If you elect to do so, the
software displays the Task Updates page from PWA directly INSIDE of the
Project Professional 2007 client. Thus, you now have the best of both
worlds. You can view all pending task updates for the current project, can
view all transaction information and Notes for each task update, and can
even select the updates and view the Preview window to see the impact on the
project if you approve the updates. From the Task Updates page inside of
Project Professional 2007, you can approve or reject task updates as needed.
Once completed, the software invites you to apply the task updates to the
enterprise project and then to open it for viewing.

Once you have the project open, you can reschedule uncompleted work from
past time periods into the current reporting period, deal with new tasks
submitted from team members and approved by you, and even do resource
leveling of overallocations as needed. Then you can launch immediately into
variance analysis to determine the current state of the project schedule
against the original Baseline schedule. From there, you can do plan
revision, if needed. Once you complete all of this, you can save and
publish the latest schedule details.

From there, you can open another enterprise project and do the whole process
again. The beauty of doing all this directly in the Project Professional
2007 client is that you can focus on ONE PROJECT at a time, and give you
full attention to this project during the process of approving task updates,
resheduling uncompleted work, doing variance analysis, and even plan
revision. You are not distracted by the pending updates in other projects.
Anyway, that's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it! Hope this helps.