Why would someone use Sync to Protected Actuals (in the tracking m

[Amy Booth Denver]

I have a client who was instructed to always choose Sync to Protected Actuals
in MSP 2003after receiving updates from PWA. They have been having a lot of
trouble, and when investigating this, we found that the protected work field
has completing unexpected numbers in it. (I am assuming Sych to Protected
Actuals puts the data that is in the Protected Actuals field into actual work
- yes?)

This group also has a custom productivity report written is MS Access using
the project tables, but I don't know what fields they are pulling from. I
don't know if that is related.

Any ideas or help would be great.

 

[wbbusby]

Sync to protected actuals does put the Actual Work Protected values in Actual
Work but this should only be required when the two columns differ. While I
don't see any harm from this behavior it is likely not needed. I'd be more
concerned about the unexpected values in Actual Work Protected. You should
post more details to explore this topic. Are these administrative projects?
What do you mean by completely unexpected?

We had an issue with inflation of Actual Work Protected when we used
administrative projects. Over 20% of our resources experienced inflation by
as much as 1000%. Microsoft came on-site and found significant issues, mostly
behavioral, in our implementation of administrative projects. It seems they
are very particular about how they are managed and taking what we considered
routine actions will introduce inflation.

 

[Bob Schroen]

I am interested in your statement of "Microsoft came on-site and found
significant issues, mostly behavioral, in our implementation of
administrative projects. It seems they are very particular about how they
are managed and taking what we considered routine actions will introduce
inflation."

I too have seen some unexplained numbers but not just administrative project
however primarily.

Can you elaborate on "what we considered routine actions will introduce
inflation"?

Thanks in advance - Bob

 

[Amy Booth Denver]

Thanks.

The numbers were for non-adminstrative projects. One example: one task has
approximately 340 hours entered by the resource, but protected actuals showed
19 (which then over-wrote the 340, forcing the resource to go back and enter
time by periods again).