Re-calculating enterprise fields

[Paul Miller]

I have a number of projects in Project Server and enterprise fields that use
a calculation to display an on target status for all projects.

These fields only seem to get re-calculated for a project when the project
is opened and saved. Is there a way to automatically re-calculate these
enterprise fields without having to open, recalculate and re-save all of my
projects?

 

[Reid McTaggart]

No.

-Reid

 

[Reid McTaggart]

One thing you can do is to add the Status Date or Last Update field to a
Project Center view. That will give an indication of how "fresh" the On
Target status calculation is. You could group on the date field to easily
see which projects have not been refreshed recently.

-Reid

 

[ejavier]

I have the same problem. Can we create a script that will be run every
morning using the scheduler to update these fields in the table? Can you
tell us the names of these tables? Thanks.

 

[Reid McTaggart]

Which fields do you want to update?

If you think about it, the indicators that appear in PWA reflect the status
of the schedule the last time it was touched by the Project Manager. Isn't
that what you would want? Most common calculated indicators change only when
the schedule changes, which is an activity that the PM should do. You don't
really want to run a procedure to, for example, reschedule uncompleted work
on every project every morning, do you?

Undoubtedly, it would be nice to have a PWA indicator that changed according
to the difference between the current date and the date that the project was
last updated or saved. That would be difficult to do, which is why I suggest
simply including one of those fields in the PWA view, and then sorting or
grouping on the field so that projects that have not been touched for some
time will stand out.

 

[ejavier]

I created an enterprise field "%Planned Completion" which is simply the
duration from baseline start to current date divided by baseline duration. I
use this to compare with %Work Complete. This is the field that I want
updated everyday. I created a custom view to show this field in PWA but it
doesn't automatically recalculate. I can't use the cost metrics because we
still have to work on standard costing so we track based on schedule.