RE: Actual work from unopened projects not reflected in resource u

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Hi Reid,

Thanks for the response. You have confirmed what I had deduced. You
are indeed correct that PWA will give the proper picture of the work across
all projects. However, for my situation the solution is incomplete. Let me
explain.

Suppose I want to use load levelling. Typically I would open up a
file, go to Resource Usage, select the resource I want to level, and have at
it. But, actuals in other projects appear to be ignored, as per our
discussion, and I wind up overcommitting my resources by the amount of
actual time. In a nutshell, this means that resource levelling doesn't work,
at least not in any useful way.

Do you have a suggestion that would allow resource levelling to be used
in my environment?

I have been watching others trying to deal with the problem, and am
seeing all sorts of schemes being tried. The most common is to set up
massive numbers of dependencies between tasks in order to "waterfall" them.
Unfortulately, this creates "spaghetti code" projects, and in most cases
(ie., where the dependencies are strictly to force a schedule, and do not
represent actuall task relationships) are a misuse of the dependency
mechanism. A second is to force dates on tasks (ie., "must start on" and the
like. This is problematic because as time information is entered every week,
the schedule owners have to go back and redo all the dates.

I'm not sure what the limitation is here. I imagine that some sort of
database is created that represents time in all projects. If so, does the
information on actuals get into this (in which case, perhaps a 3rd party
levelling product might do better), or is it left out completely?

Thanks,
Mike

"Reid McTaggart" wrote:

> You can use PWA to get your rollups of Actuals and other such data. The
> behavior is not a bug because the tool was never designed to do what you want.
>
> Showing all work across all projects is useful for planning assignments.
> Analyzing Actuals is a retrospective analytical activity that is handled in
> PWA.
>
> I do agree that the advice to open all projects is not practical. It should
> say to use PWA.
> --
> Reid McTaggart
> EPM Architect
> Microsoft
>
>
> "MikeR" wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I have a perplexing problem. It appears that when I open one or a few
> > files (out of many) from Project Server, actual work from unopened projects
> > is not reflected in the work rollup. See article 888638 on Microsoft's site
> >
> > http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;888638&spid=2525&sid=global
> >
> > The suggested workaround is to open all files relating to the resource in
> > question. While this works, this is impractical in my environment because:
> >
> > 1 - there are hundreds of files
> > 2 - some files, such as those representing administrative time, were not
> > meant to be managed by any other than a few admins (this is a current
> > business practice of ours)
> > 3 - I may not have access to every relevant file
> >
> > Is there another way around this? Anyone know of plans to fix it?
> >
> > As an aside, this behavior certainly looks like a bug to me - after all, it
> > appears that I can see the planned work from unopened files just fine. The
> > article cited above spins this as a "behavior" rather than a "problem" or
> > "bug", though I haven't found any reference in the regular documentation that
> > would lead to this conclusion. I would hope that someone is looking at a
> > more satisfactory resolution than opening all files. Anyone out there have
> > additional details on what might be in store?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Mike
.

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