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 :)

How to Manually edit Actual Cost in Project Professional

By default, Actual Cost column is locked down in Project professional both at Task and assignment level. Actual cost is calculated from Actual Work and Fixed Cost values. This way, the relationship with Work done and cost accrued remain consistent.

 

Ground realities are many times more complex and actual costs involve Journaling, currency conversions and other adjustments. This is typically handled in ERP systems and all PM wants to do is to manually enter the actual cost value in Project so that she can track the remaining cost.

 

To enter the actual costs manually, you need to change the following setting in Project Professional.

 

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Project Online – SSIS OData Replication – Lessons Learned

I recently got a chance to work on an SSIS Package in Windows Azure environment which periodically retrieved the Project online data via OData connector and stored over an Azure SQL Database for SSRS based reporting.

 

Here are some of my takeaways from this exercise.

 

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Effective Project, Portfolio & Work Management, Using SharePoint

SharePoint 2013 has some exciting new features around Project Management. I delivered a webinar on this topic last Wednesday. Check the full webinar recording below on YouTube.

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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