Timesheet actuals overwriting estimates, can we keep the original estimates to see variances?

[Tony Josephs]

We have been using PWA and PS2k for a month now and are getting used to its
little foibles. One we can't seem to find an answer to in MS Project 2k
Inside Out or Gary's MS Project Server 2002 tome is that every time we
accept updates from timesheets back to the project plan, if the actuals are
greater than the estimates (stored in work), work is over written with the
actuals value. So we can't track what the work was before and therefore how
much we have gone over on a particular task.

Am I missing some simple setting somewhere?


We record hours of work done per day but not work remaining and I know that
this might sound stupid but we don't baseline our projects. Do we need to
get into a whole baselining thing before the estimates will stick?

Please let me know.


TIA


Tony

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Tony:

This is the purpose of setting a baseline. Baselines preserve your original
estimates and all the lovely calculated variance fields you see through out
the application are calculated from the baseline.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Tony --

What you are seeing is the default behavior of Microsoft Project, and is not
related to how Project Server functions. Essentially, whenver Actual Work
is entered, it always replaces the Work values. If you assign me to 40
hours of Work on a task and I perform 48 hours of Actual Work, the system
records the 48 hours as both Work and Actual Work. The way to know that I
was originally assigned 40 hours of Work is to examine the Baseline Work
field for this task. Your failure to baseline your projects is the direct
source of your problems, since the project Baseline fields record the
original estimates for each task, resource, and assignment. From this point
forward, I trust that you will begin baselining your projects before they go
to production. Hope this helps.

--
Dale A. Howard [MVP]
Enterprise Project Trainer/Consultant
Denver, Colorado
http://www.msprojectexperts.com
"We wrote the book on Project Server"

 

[Tony Josephs]

Gary / Dale

thank you. Baselines it is then. I'll investigate a method that works for
our organisation and still provides the best monitoring data.


Thank you once again.


Tony

 

[Larry]

Tony,

We are in the middle of implementing Project and PWA a
throughout our engineering business. The behavior you are
seeing is by design. The concept is that you can never
plan to do less work that you have actually done. Project
as a result overwrites Work with Actual Work when Actual
Work > Work. What you need to do is to use a baseline to
store your approved or "frozen budget". You can use the
baseline functions to save Work and all of the other
baseline fields or you can just manage the Baseline Work
field as a frozen budget. You can then add this field to
your views and give it an appropriate column heading. Our
terminology is called working budget.

I hope this helps. We have a few Project and Project
server bruises ourselves but there is far more good's than
bad's.

Regards,

Larry

 

[Tony Josephs]

Thanks for your words of wisdom and encouragement.


Tony