How much can you over allocate a resource in resource plan?

I was giving Resource plan feature demo to a customer and out of curiosity, customer asked if I can assign 1,000 days of work to a resource on a single day. It turned out we couldn’t. When you press Save after assigning 1,000 days of work the system gave the following error.

 

“Your updates were not saved because of the following reasons: General error: Work value used is invalid. (Use this error information along with other errors to find out the cause of the problem.)”

 

The behaviour was same for generic resources. And this raised the inevitable question from customer. “How much can I over allocate a resource on a given day in the resource plan?”

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3 minute guide to Department field usage

Here is a very brief summary of how Department field is commonly used in Project Online, Project Server 2013 and Project Server 2010. You need to have some values in “Department” lookup table to get any advantage from it.

 

1-    Filter custom fields in a Project.

Assign a department to a Project level Custom field, then create a new project and assign the same department value to Project Departments field. The custom field will only appear in your newly created Project.

 

2-    Filter resource level custom fields for Resource.

Assign a department to a Resource level Custom field, then create a new resource and assign the same department value to Resource Departments field. The custom field will only appear for your newly created Resource

 

3-    Show EPTs only to certain users.

Assign a department to an EPT. Assign same department value to a Resource in Resource Departments field. Only that resource will see the EPT as an available option to create the new project from.

 

Department fields are also utilised to filter OLAP cube data, Portfolio Analysis business drivers and driver prioritisations.  If you really want to learn more about department field, check out this article by Treb Gatte.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/projectadministration/archive/2010/03/17/departmental-custom-fields.aspx

 

Did you read this blog in in less than 3 minutes?  Let me know in comments and I’ll update the blog title :)

Filter SSRS Report on Project Site

[Populate SSRS Report Parameters via JavaScript]

 

Requirement

Display a Project specific data on a Project Site using an SSRS Report.

 

Solution

SSRS Report can be displayed on a SharePoint web part page using Report Viewer Control. The Challenge was to populate the parameter with Project Name so that only that Project specific data gets loaded in SSRS Report.

 

Our familiar hero, JavaScript came to the rescue again, though it took some help from Text Filter Web Part this time. Following are the steps

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Make PDP Read-only for certain users or groups

Requirement

There is a particular PDP (say, financial information) which should only be editable by PMO and rest (including PM) should see it in read-only mode.

 

Solution

There were some solutions available on other blogs (see alternative solutions section) but i wanted to have a simpler solution. Its relatively easy to disable the input fields using JavaScript. The interesting part was to do it for certain users (anyone other then PMO) only. I used SharePoint Web part Audience Targeting feature to execute the disabling script only for limited users. Here is the summary of the solution

 

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Project Server Security Scenarios – Part 3

Part 2 of this blog can be read here

 

Scenario 5: PM to only add Generic resources to their Project Team whereas Resources Managers should be adding specific resources.

 

Bob the PM Should not directly be assigning actual people to its Project. Instead, he should be assigning Generic Resources. A resource manager can later add specific resources. Once specific resources are added, PM should be able to assign tasks to those specific resources as well.

 

Solution:

1) PMs by default have permission to assign any resource. To remove this permission, Go to Server Settings -> Manage Groups,

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Project Server Security Scenarios – Part 2

Part 1 of this blog can be read here

 

Scenario 3: Bob should access SharePoint Project Site for some Projects (But shouldn’t access Project details in PWA)

 

Bob is a user who’ll only be accessing SharePoint based Project sites to work on Risks, Issues and other SharePoint related stuff in Project Sites. He’ll only be using PWA to access Project Site and won’t be using any other Project Server Feature.

 

Solution 1:

The best way is to add Bob in that Project’s Project Team. If Bob doesn’t have any task assigned to him then he’ll get reader access to that project. If Bob requires Contribute access (so that he can add content to the Project Site), then there must be at least 1 task assigned to him on that Project.

However, under default configuration, Bob will also get Team Member permissions on that Project, which means he’ll be able to see Project Schedule, can create new task assignment etc.

Refer to Solution 2 below, if you want Bob to access Project Sites but you don’t want to allow him anything else to do in PWA.

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Project Server Security Scenarios – Part 1

In this blog series, I’ll talk about implementing some specific security requirements in Microsoft Project Server 2010 / 2013. I’ll assume that you already have some basic idea about Groups, Categories & Permissions but if that’s not the case, you can learn about Project Server 2010 Security Model (also applicable on Project Server 2013) through this excellent article by Ben Howard
http://www.applepark.co.uk/project-server-security-explained/

Project Server 2013 also offers a new permission mode known as SharePoint permission mode. As the name suggests, it is managed via SharePoint 2013 permissions model. It is a simplified model which can quickly be implemented, but it is not possible to implement the scenarios I am going to cover in this blog and hence the rest of the blog will only talk about classic Project Server permissions mode.

Scenario 1: Bob should access all Projects managed by his Department
By “Project managed by his department”, I mean the projects where the Project Manager belongs to Bob’s department. We don’t want to give access to Bob on the projects where his resources are working as a team member but not managing the projects.

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