Time Keeping in Project Server 2003

[Andy]

I am a PM for an engineering consulting firm and we are currently working on
deployment of Server 2003 to a pilot group within our organization. We plan
to deploy company wide in the near future.

A primary concern of ours with projects is tracking the actual work
performed by our engineers on each project task against the hours that we've
built into the customer quote for each project task...this is how we track
profitability of our projects and we use this information to build more
accurate future quotes. To do this we need to keep a static duration on our
project tasks and track our engineer's progress against this duration by
logging actual time daily/weekly. My problem is that our engineers can be
assigned to and working on multiple customer projects simultaneously and just
b/c a task has a duration of 3 days doesn't necessarily mean that this task
is going to be worked on for 3 days straight...it could take 3 days of work
over a 2 week timespan. Is there a way to break the link b/w duration and
start/finish time so that the engineer can log time to a 3 day task over a 2
week period while keeping duration and start/finish dates accurate?

Thanks for any help you can spare,
Andy

 

[Rod Gill]

No! I think you are going about this in the wrong way. The way I would
expect to do this is:

Task has duration of 3d and work of 4h.
Save Baseline when schedule has been agreed, or work starts.
After updating by timesheet the duration becomes 2w and the Actual Work is
6h.
Baseline still shows 4h work and duration 3d.

From a scheduling perspective Project is telling you that either the
resources were not available, or materials, information or decision etc was
not available. Because of all the chasing required to get info etc and
because the task was picked up and put down a number of times, work (hence
cost) increased 50%.

Out of interest, there is an interesting Agile project management
methodology called lean construction. In it, there is a list of Tasks that
should be done for the week, a separate list for tasks that can be started
and finished (they have all that they need to complete - information, tools,
materials, people etc.) and finally another list again of the tasks the team
commits to completing this week. This technique typically shows up to 30%
saving in resource time and costs. Maybe you can implement a version of it?

Back to project. More accurate scheduling would not occur if you forced the
duration to remain at 3d. You might start to get more accurate work
predictions, but scheduling requires duration to predict completion dates.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Andy:

You can't change the way the scheduling engine behaves, but I don't really
think that's what you want to do anyway. With that said, the system supports
the scenario you're describing without doing anything special. You schedule
your project, set a baseline, and then start tracking. When your resource
posts their first time against a task, the system sets an actual start date.
When you update these actuals, the system automatically reschedules the
remaining portion of the task to start after the status date (provided you
have configured your system correctly). As your resource enters more time,
the system records the actual work against the specific dates and the task
duration increases or decreases accordingly. Is there something about this
process you're having trouble with? Like I said, your system should support
this without you even thinking about it. Of course, your project plans need
to be well structured to allow the schedule to flow. If you're hand-typed a
lot of dates in your schedule, then your problem is not with Project Server,
it's understanding Project. If this is the case, some Project training might
help.