PS2007: Task actuals appearing out of nowhere

[.jussi]

One of my resources recently ran into a very strange problem. One of her
tasks was filled in with actuals over a lengthy period (2+ weeks) with an
even spread of 0.025 hours per day, totaling to 7.5 hours (1 day of work).
She had entered some time towards that task previously, but the task still
had remaining work. The task still has remaining work too - just this one day
of work appeared from somewhere and got spread over the length of the task up
to the current date.

Neither the project manager or the resource can think of anything they've
done that could have resulted in this - has anyone seen behaviour like this
before? Any pointers to where to start the digging?

I will admit that this is not an up-to-date installation. SP2 has not been
applied.

Thank you,
- Jussi

 

[Gary L. Chefetz]

Jussi:

Does your system have the latest patches? The April CU was released this
week. This sounds like the symptoms of a bug that was fixed in the December
CU. Patch your system if it's not up to date, including your Project
Clients.

 

[GarthP - MCITP]

Jussi:
I've struck this issue many times with customers' systems and has been a
feature of Project Server that is often overlooked.

This issue can occur if you allow project managers to enter % complete
values for tasks in their project plans.

e.g
If there is a task with a duration of 5 days (40 hours - 8hrs/day) that the
user may have entered actuals against and the project manager decides to
update the % Complete value to 25%, Project Server will distribute 10 hours
actual work (25% of 40) across the 5 days (2 hrs per day). This will
overwrite any actuals that the user may have entered via PWA when the plan is
published.

How do you stop it?
Your PMO needs to make a decision as to whether Actual Time is to be entered
purely by the task assignees or if the project managers can modify actuals as
well.
If you decide that all actual time should only be entered by the task
assignees then there is a setting in PWA to accomodate this.

It's at >Server Settings>Task Settings and Display>Protect User Updates>
There is a check box "Restrict updates to Project Web Access" which when
checked will only stop project managers from being able to update actual
hours.

It's really down to a process issue and user awareness of the system features.

Hope that helps