Using Administrative Projects

The Project Center allows you to create and manage Administrative projects that are used to assign and track "non-project" activities outside the normal bounds of particular projects. The concept of non-working time, which was used within Microsoft Project Server 2002, is no longer used within Microsoft Office Project 2003. Administrative projects are now used to track this type of activity.

There are several advantages to using Administrative projects:

• All team members can use a common approach to report non-project time.

• Individual working projects can eliminate the need to include these types of activities within the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

• Administrative project resource assignment information is used during the calculation of OLAP cube data displayed within the Project Center and Resource Center Portfolio Analyzer views.

Administrative projects can be created using any of three strategies:

• Use the Project Web Access Project Center Manage Administrative Projects menu.

• Use the Microsoft Project 2003 Professional menu sequence File, Save As, Administrative Project check box.

• Load a predefined Administrative project template.

Each of these techniques creates a special type of project schedule that is designed to use particular administrative project scheduling and time-tracking methods . These special features can be summarized as follows :

• Tasks are defined as Fixed Duration, not Effort Driven, for scheduling.

• Project Web Access Tasks timesheet data always uses direct time entry, Hours of Work Done per Time Period, rather than %Complete or remaining work methods.

• Administrative projects appear at the bottom of the team member timesheet view.

• Administrative project tasks appear as categories selectable within the Notify Your Manager of Time You Will Not Be Available for Project Work.

Except for these special conditions, Administrative projects are developed and maintained like any other project schedule.

TIP

Consider creating a standard business process whereby you name Administrative projects so they appear in certain locations within the Project Center summary views. For example, if you prefix all Administrative project names with "ZZ" they will automatically appear at the bottom of Project Center summary views. Also consider creating Enterprise Global Custom Project Codes that reflect the nature of Administrative projects, so people easily group and filter Administrative projects within various lists.