Handling Actuals from Resources

When the project manager logs on to PWA, he or she sees immediately whether resources have submitted new actual work, or other information. The project manager can then review the submissions and have them posted to the project plan. After they are included in the project plan, Project Professional responds to actuals by recalculating task durations and rescheduling remaining work, as needed.

In this section, we’ll illustrate how a project manager reviews and processes information submitted by resources.

1. Steve Masters, a project manager at A.Datum Corporation, logs on to PWA. Steve immediately sees that he has pending task changes from resources.

2. Steve clicks the three task updates from resources under the Approvals label, and PWA switches to the Task Updates Center, where Steve can view the details of the task changes from resources.

3. Today, Steve is focused primarily on Brad Sutton’s most recent work on the 200GB USB v2 External Hard Drive project.

4. Steve selects the tasks for which Brad has submitted actuals, and clicks Accept.

Project Server records the progress in the 200GB USB v2 External Hard Drive project and reports that Steve has no additional updates.

Next, Steve can evaluate the actual work submitted by Brad Sutton and other resources in Project and make schedule adjustments as needed.

With PWA and the Outlook integration add-in, all of the actual work recorded in the project plan can come directly from the resources; the project manager does not need to reenter this information into the project plan. However, the project manager always maintains control over what information is and is not incorporated into the project plan.