Handling Actuals from Resources

When the project manger logs on to Project Web Access, he or she sees immediately whether resources have submitted new actual work, nonworking time, or other information. The project manager can then review the submissions and have them posted to the project plan. After they are 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 Project Web Access. Steve immediately sees that he has pending task changes from resources.

   

   Steve could also have navigated to the Updates Center in Project Web Access to see this information.

2. Steve clicks the 6 task changes from resources link, and Project Web Access switches to the Updates Center, where Steve can see the details of the task changes from resources.

   

3. Steve switches to the Gantt Chart view and then clicks the View Options link to see how he can change the view of the task updates.

   

4. Steve switches to the Timesheet view and then adjusts the View Options to show scheduled work as well as actual work submitted by the resources. He also hides the task pane in Project Web Access to see more of the Timesheet view.

   

5. Today Steve is mainly focused on Brad Sutton’s most recent work on the 200GB USB v2 External Hard Drive project. For the two tasks in this project for which Brad has submitted actuals, Steve clicks in the Accept? column and, in the drop-down list that appears, clicks Accept.

   

   The other task changes that resources have submitted to Steve will remain in the Updates Center until Steve acts on them.

6. To conclude the update process for these assignments, Steve clicks the Update button.

   Project Server opens the 200GB USB v2 External Hard Drive project in Project Professional, records the actual work against Brad Sutton’s assignments, and prompts Steve to save the project plan.

   

   The project plan remains open in Project Server, where Steve can evaluate the actual work submitted by Brad Sutton and other resources and make schedule adjustments as needed.

With Project Web Access and the Outlook integration add-in, all the actual work and resource working time settings recorded in the project plan can come directly from the resources; the project manager does not have 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.