Timesheet hours do not match Actual Work Protected in Projects

[Rene]

Wow ! I'm lost on this one -
We're running PWA 2003 with Managed Time Periods set. There are 55
timesheet resources. At the end of any given time period they rack up
a minimum of 80 hours each or 4440 hours. All PM have accepted their
hours. All projects have been updated and saved. A report is run with
the Portfolio Analyzer for that time period. The Grand total of Actual
Work Protected and Timesheets should be equal - THEY ARE NOT.

Hours on timesheets are not updating projects accurately and I've tried
everything to identify the problem and correct the issue.

First, I isolated a project (and there are many) and a timesheet period
that has a miss-match.
I verified that I am comparing apples to apples, that is I have the
correct snapshot of timesheets and a Portfolio Analyzer report of
Actual Work Protected for the same period.

I open the project, select Tools, Tracking, Sync to Protected Actuals,
Save

I made sure that no timesheets had pending updates. All timesheet
hours were a black font, not blue, and not red

Then, I Opened PWA, Admin, Manage Enterprise Features, Update
Frequency, Update Now, executed and waited for the OLAP to update.

No synchronization occurred.

I opened the closed timesheet period and retried the above - NO JOY

Most timesheet to Protected Actual are in sync but there are too many
that are not. Any clues - anyone, anyone (is this Voodoo ecconomics??)

Rene

 

[Guidho]

What service pack do you have installed for Project Server?
If SP1, this is a known issue.

Hope this helps,
Guidho

 

[Rene]

Hi Guidho;
Thanks for your suggestion but it's beyond my level of expertise. The
Booking Type is something I can handle but I wished I had the savvy to
try what you suggest.

Rene

 

[Rene]

What service pack do you have installed for Project Server?
If SP1, this is a known issue.

Hope this helps,
Guidho

We have SP2 applied.

Actually, I have more information about this problem. I've zeroed in
on a project that is not updating my OLAP cube. This project has 11K
hours accumulated since April 06. When I run a portfolio analyzer
report the pivot table only reports 2.2k hours. The project looks good
to me but in PWA when I do a month by month look at the resource list
it varies. For this past 2 week timesheets period 992 hours accumulated
for this project but zero hours show up when I run pivot table report.

Any ideas??
Thanks, Rene

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Rene:

I think you should have your technical resources obtain and install the Post
SP hotfix package. Let us know if that clears the problem. See:

http://www.projectserverexperts.com...p://www.projectserverexperts.com/default.aspx

 

[Rene]

Hi Gary;
Thanks for your suggestion and I may go in this direction if my current
plan fails.

After considerable thought, the history of this problem maybe, but
I'm not sure, the results of a hardware / Project server crash that
occurred during the Labor Day weekend. We were down for a 4 days while
a larger hard drive was installed and Project Server backup files were
brought online. At the time, no one noticed any problems because
reports from the portfolio analyzer were not required. When report
samples were requested was when discrepancies between timesheets and
OLAP data surfaced.

To take a hard look at this problem, I zeroed in on a worthy project,
one that has 992 timesheet hours missing from the most recently closed
manage timesheet period.

I reviewed every timesheet and made sure all hours have been updated to
the project. I republished the project, did a manual sync to actuals,
everything to no avail.

My final plan was to rebuild the project. I did a "save as" to copy
the project with a new name, rebuilt the structure, published the
project, forced the OLAP to update, and walah! The rebuilt project
synchronized with the timesheets and all the missing hours.

That's the good news. The bad news is this fix has ramifications.

First, is the timesheet history for this project? The rebuilt project
captures the previous Actual Work Protected history. This put the
project and the OLAP back in sync. However, the individual resource
timesheet history is lost. All the resources in the rebuilt project
start with zeros. So, the problem moves to the question of how to
save the previous resource timesheet history.

I considered these facts to address the timesheet history loss issue.
I have to save the corrupted project because in the data base the
timesheet history is good, but I also have to de-activate this project
because it will not sync with my OLAP cube. Thanks to Gary, I learned
that I can remove this project and tasks from the affected resources
timesheets by changing their Booking type to "Proposed"; thank you
Gary. That works GREAT!

So, I messaged all the affected resources and requested that they
transfer all their current hours for this project to the rebuilt
project. Then I de-activated it.

The last step was to rename the corrupted project with an In-Active
prefix, and set the enterprise custom outline code (I created) to the
flag "InActive". Then I renamed the rebuilt project with the
original project name.

The resource timesheet history is saved, the rebuilt project is in sync
with project server, everything is back to normal, I'm done.

All I have to do now is identify the other projects affected and fix
them too but at least I know what to do.

Rene