Tuesday, May 22, 2007

MS Office Project Server Web Access Time Entry: Welcome to my Nightmare!

If you had a sibling growing up, you may be familiar with the following scenario: you’re working hard to complete a complicated puzzle you’ve been struggling over for hours. You think you are getting close until……wham! Your kid brother comes along, knocking the puzzle onto the floor into several pieces, then runs away laughing. If you’re like me, several “F-bombs” would be going off in your head or better yet, coming out of your mouth. My experience with Microsoft Office Project Server Web Access has provided me with the same “character building” opportunities, having left me with a few grey hairs over the years.

I’ll start by saying that I love working with Microsoft Project. It makes schedule development a fairly painless process. Its ability to link tasks and allocate time to tasks is an invaluable asset to the Project Manager. However, when you attempt to integrate the web access Time Entry functionality, it’s like setting a bull loose in a china shop. If managed correctly, it can be fairly painless. The challenge is in managing it correctly. In my last job (my favorite part of my new job is that there is no time to approve), we were responsible for approving time on a weekly basis. There is an expression that states the only certainties in life are death and taxes. For me, the third certainty in life was that my project schedule was going to look like crap every Monday after approving the employees’ time. Here is why:

1. Using a very simple example, assume you have 5 tasks in your schedule: Task 1, Task 2, Task 3, Task 4, and Task 5.
2. In creating the schedule, you estimate that each task will take 5 business days.
3. You only have 1 resource, so you schedule the tasks to be completed consecutively. In order to do this graphically, you set it up so that Task 2 starts after the completion of Task 2, Task 3 after the completion of Task 2, etc. In the end, you have a nice, tidy 5 week schedule.
4. The next step is to publish it to the MS Project Web Server, so that your employee can enter his time on Fridays.
5. On Monday morning, you approve the employee time entry. However, rather than entering his time into Task 1, your employee enters 40 hours against alternate tasks, some on different project schedules.
6. When you look at your schedule, it has pushed out a week. It was anticipating 40 hours worked on Task 1 for the week. When it didn’t arrive, it assumed that the task was late starting and shows your project as being behind schedule.


However, this is not a realistic scenario. In a real project, you’ll have many employees with many task assignments. In my last position, I had over 50 employees entering time concurrently into my project schedules. Some weeks, the damage was minimal, other times fairly significant. All this being said, it can be tightly controlled if the Project Manager is given the time to manage the schedule. It is a full-time job. With only a couple of hours per week to work on schedule repair, it puts the Project Manager in a difficult position. This was a major point of contention with my fellow managers. In fact, one outburst was captured on security video, as seen below:



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