projectified : Deployment Practices

New Project Server Admin Blog

brianken — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:35:52 GMT

The product team for Project and Project Server have started a new blog to segment their content about the administration of Project Server environments. It can be found here and will be a must read if you are involved in the deployment or administration of Project Server.

PMBlvd Blog Guest Post

brianken — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:43:43 GMT

I guest posted over on the PMBlvd blog “PM Bistro” about keeping processes and PM tools simple. Check it out.

Server-Side Calculation of Custom Field Formulas

brianken — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:21:39 GMT

So I have a PSI application that pulls data from Oracle Financials and correlates it to specific projects in Project Server. using a key field it brings over 6 fields and writes it to 6 Project level Enterprise Number fields. It updates the fields and then calls QueueUpdateProject which should trigger a recalculation of custom field formulas. I also have several custom fields that use the original 6 fields in their formulas.

My problem is that the fields with formulas were not getting updated. If I opened the project into Project Professional then they calculated just fine.

It turns out that there is a problem with the calculation ‘engine’ in Project Server that causes it to stop recalculating these formulas if any one of them returns an error. In my case the error was caused by this formula: [Capital Actuals]/[Capital Plan] because for some of the projects the Capital Plan field was 0.

The solution is to make sure your formulas cannot return such an error. In my case it was changing the formula to this:
IIF([Capital Plan]>0, [Capital Actuals]/[Capital Plan], 0)

Similar issues can possibly be caused by a formula like [Field A]+[Field B] if either A or B have been deleted.

So if any of you are having issues where your field formulas are not refreshing properly go and check all your formulas and see if any of them are returning errors.

Merry Christmas\Happy Holidays\Have a Happy Next Two Weeks :-)

New Disaster Recovery Info on TechNet

brianken — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:31:57 GMT

If you deploy or manage a deployment of Project Server 2007 you should read this new content:

Deployment Practices: Configuration >< Process

brianken — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:46:06 GMT

It is easy for users new to a system like Project Server to see the configuration of fields, views, reports and security as the whole picture of doing a deployment of Project Server. It is also easy to see why there might be this confusion. On the surface it makes sense. You look at the processes in an organization and then you look at security, reports, views, and fields, etc and then configure the tool to match. Easy, right? Not so much.

Doing a deployment of project management software well is not that simple. You need to examine how the tool will be used, how projects get managed, how tasks get estimated by PMs and how resources are assigned. If several PMs define their tasks very tightly (short durations with high resource units) while others define theirs more loosely (longer durations with low resource units) it has an impact on how the data can be analyzed across projects. With the tighter scheduling there can be higher risk of slip but with the looser scheduling the data provides less certainty about where you can put new tasks or projects into the system. I’m not passing judgement on either method there are pros and cons to both. My point here is that this is an example of how the way the tool will be used needs to be taken into account when helping the customer understand how other areas of the tool can be used to make decisions about things like resource allocations or the adding of new projects to the mix. A good configuration is about more than just a few fields and setting up AD sync. It is about having the tool match how the organization works.

This brings up the even bigger part: what if how they do it now is not how they want to be doing it (or even harder, how they want to be doing it but not how they SHOULD be doing it?) Now comes the rough job of helping them understand where changes can be made and how those changes can be broken down into small, more easily digestible changes and road-mapped. More later…