My Task vs. Time Sheets

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    • #5107
      Saeed Jalalian
      Keymaster

      Using “My Tasks” for the past two years has been very successful tracking only “Actual Hours” on each project in 2007.  Now they want on a high level, “forecast” or “planned” hours for each high level task by the same user and will not upgrade to 2010.  No % complete or remaining hours are needed.  Simple right?  I’m looking for a comparison of the features between My Tasks and Time Sheets.  Using “Planned” hours in My Tasks is dangerous since it will mix with “Actual” hours at some point.  Time Sheets keeps the “Actual” and “Planned” separate.  Do I still need to do the painful publishing of 50+ projects twice a week if we use Time Sheets?

    • #6761
      Saeed Jalalian
      Keymaster

      Ed,

      You can technically enter time on the timesheet without sending that time to the project plan but I suspect the down side will create issues.  What about using baseline as the plan against actual work?  Will that work?

    • #10524
      Saeed Jalalian
      Keymaster

      Larry,

      Thanks for the response.  With “My Tasks”, data in the Baselines and Planned fields will mix with the “Actual Hours” data.  We are using Fixed Duration and tried using Fixed Units and Fixed Work with the same results.  When 150 resources are on a task, somehow during the duration of the task, (even if it set for 300 days) will find itself at 100%.  That 100% forces all “Planned” hours into Actuals.  The team has built some the best dashboards in the industry for reporting time again a high level task in a number of projects using Xcelsius as the reporting tool.

      We are thinking about Time Sheets instead since the data is kept away from the project plan.  Then maybe use the “Planned” fields.  However, I think the act of “Publishing” will have the potential of mixing this data.  We would like to simply keep “Actual Hours” and “Forecast or “Planned” hours completely separate and let Xcelsius do the rest.

    • #6764
      Saeed Jalalian
      Keymaster

      Ed,

      You should check the behavior again.  Actual hour updates will not change baseline data, but it will change work (or planned) data.  You are also working with some difficult practices that are normally not best practice.  Neither using 150 resources on a task or fixed duration tasks is best practice.

      You can use timesheets, but updating the project whether from the task sheet or timesheet will update actual hours in the project plan and adjust work to match.  Publishing from the project plan doesn’t affect work.  It’s updating actuals from PWA back to the project that will affect the plan.

      Hope that helps.  I am trying to help with limited knowledge of the total picture so I apologize if it isn’t exactly what you are looking for.

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