PS 2007 Generic Resource Assignment Owners

[Jonathan H]

Hello,

Reading through this newsgroup I think this is bug, but if it is then
annoyingly it is one that has not been addressed in SP1.

I've recently created a 'big' plan with lots of Generic resources. My Tasks
is now 47 pages long!!

These are Generic Resources; they will always be as such as it is planning
tool to account for planned resource requirements against actual
availability. As we move forward with our adoption of PS we'll transfer
these generics to real people, but we're moving slowling.

So, my question: is it correct for Generic Resources to have assignment
owners? These are not real people and so would never actually 'do work' and
hence never book time.
Assuming that that answer to the above question is 'no', does anyone have
any ideas?

Thank you,

Jonathan

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Jonathan --

The best I can tell you is that this is a bug, and a very annoying one at
that. Hope this helps.

 

[Jonathan H]

Hi Dale,

Well, I'm not sure it helps, but at least it confirms what I thought.

I'm surprised this wasn't address in SP1 as it looks pretty horrible, and
obvious. Has MS acknowledged this as a defect? If not, short of a Support
call to them, does anyone know a way of raising it?

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me.

Jonathan

 

[LeneG]

Hi Dale,

Well, I'm not sure it helps, but at least it confirms what I thought.

I'm surprised this wasn't address in SP1 as it looks pretty horrible, and
obvious. Has MS acknowledged this as a defect? If not, short of a Support
call to them, does anyone know a way of raising it?

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me.

Jonathan







- Vis tekst i anførselstegn -

Hi
My generic resources DO NOT have an assignment owner and because of
that all tasks assigned to generic resources and sent to PM´"My tasks"
- which is really annoying.
Actually I asked about this in this group a while ago.
Description of issues in Project Server 2007 Migration

Issue 1- "My tasks" list is heavily overloaded

We have carried out a test migration of all projects in our Project
Server 2003 to PS 2007.
After a republish of all projects we have noticed that the "my tasks"
list for Project Managers contains many many tasks, that do not belong
to the PM.

One PM has 130 tasks, another has 1130 tasks in the task list.

After some investigations, we have found out that the tasks, which are
in the task list have resources that are either inactive or generic.



Whether this is by design or an error, we don't know.

Our theory is, that if a task has an inactive resource assigned,
Project doesn't know what to do with the task being unable to "send"
it to a tasklist and therefore chooses to show the task in the PM/
Project Owners task list. Usually Project uses the windows-account to
make sure that tasks are shown correctly and in the correct task list.

This might make sense since this forces the PM to "clean up", and to
make sure that tasks are assigned only to active resources.

But for the generic resources this does not make sense.
Generic resources have by default no windows account and by default no
task list, since generic resources can't have actual work. (that would
not make sense)

Why they show up in the PM´s taks list is a mystery.

But we have a theory on this as well.
We think that it has been designed so that all tasks with generics
resources assigned and scheduled to start or finish in the "near"
future are shown in PM´s tasks list to ensure that the PM will actual
reassign the work to active resources instead of generic.

But.... this doens´t work too well.

 

[Bilal]

\From Project Management theories point of view, the PM should acquire
his/her final team once he started the execution of the project. Any other
exception is just an exception
So, I assumed all the generic resource is used during planning phase and
this make sence. My point of view that all of these tasks should not send to
anybody, the Resource Manager and Project Manager should receive another type
of alerts to remind them to acquire the actual resource before enough time of
start executing the corresponding tasks
Just an idea


--

Best Regards

Bilal Okour
blog : http://ebilal.spaces.live.com

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Jonathan H --

The workaround is to make the Generic resources non-Generic. You can retain
the name, but deselect the Generic option for each of the Generic resources.
You can then set an Assignment Owner value for each Generic-like resource.
That's the only workaround of which I am aware. And I believe this is
already logged as a bug. Hope this helps.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

One other workaround is to not publish these assignments.

--

Gary L. Chefetz, MVP
MSProjectExperts
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