I wouldn’t create a Project-style plan for this. I’d focus on making sure the list is always in priority order and contains well-defined tasks and a clear statement of what constitutes “this task is complete”. Then I’d explain the rules to the team and let them go to work.
What value would you get from building the type of plan you describe?
Got the answer from Dale Howard on another forum. Created a user group called Manage Project Owner, added my user to it, allowed Manage Basic Project Security permission to the group for the My Organization category. You could instead apply the permission directly to the user account, but that’s harder to maintain.
Very helpful, thanks so much, Larry. On to the next crisis!
Yes, we have Booking Type in the view, but it’s read-only there. Don’t know if you’re able to verify on a PWA 2010 server, but if so, I’d appreciate knowing if yours is editable.
Sarah, we have faced the same problems. Estimation is a skill that people have to work to improve, regardless of the units they use to express the estimate. We standardized on Fixed Work, Effort Driven because it allowed us to all speak in the same terms, but there’s nothing magically better about this method. I do like it because there is a nice correspondence between the estimated and the actual work. It seems to convey more task ownership when I can see my original estimate and the actual time it took me, right there. If I say “give me a week”, I’ll know if I miss the end date, but I’ll learn nothing about why.
Anyway, don’t give up!
“What are the consequences for team members not completing their updates?” There are no real consequences. If the PM is of a certain personality type, he or she might call out the behavior in the context of a team meeting, but that does not always happen.
Our company has not mandated the updates because we already have so many disparate systems with which employees are expected to interact. Various engineering supervisors have different attitudes about what their people should have to do. PWA updates would certainly help the PM out, but they are not critical, since the PM can still do the updates just as before Server came along.
The consequences are that the PM has to contact the person to get a status or discuss it in the team meetings, which is what we want to avoid by using Server. Additionally, we want resources to feel that they really own their estimates and the actual effort, and we lose some of that reinforcement if they don’t update actual effort through the system.
Our resources are not used to updating progress this precisely. In the past they could just say, “I’m about half done” or “I need another week”, but PWA wants them to really look at the estimate, the time spent so far, whether they are on track, etc. Of course, this is why we installed Server, not a defect, but that’s been some of the user feedback.
Users also don’t like e-mail alerts, but without them we couldn’t communicate assignments very easily, as we are a global company with resources across many time zones.