Forum Discussion
Time Reporting to Project Not Task
Hi All,
My organization has struggled to implement MS Project Timesheets in the past due to the amount of work and coordination needed to manage time reporting at the task level. Frequently, resources made unintended changes to tasks and task dates became out of sync with actuals due to dynamic projects.
We want to track the time spent on specific projects but we do not want to track the time spent on tasks. Is it possible to configure Timesheets this way?
Currently, we are using one project schedule where a task is created to represent each project. Resources are reporting all time into this single project schedule. This too is difficult to maintain as it must be manually updated as new projects are created / old projects completed.
Thank you all for your input!
Charles
Given the amount of trouble you have had with Timesheet reporting PWA, I am surprised you have not abandoned this entirely. However, if you do want to continue having team members to report high-level progress, there are two settings on the Timesheet Settings and Default page in PWA that your app admin will need to change. I have highlighted them with the red outlines in the image below. Hope this helps.
Given the amount of trouble you have had with Timesheet reporting PWA, I am surprised you have not abandoned this entirely. However, if you do want to continue having team members to report high-level progress, there are two settings on the Timesheet Settings and Default page in PWA that your app admin will need to change. I have highlighted them with the red outlines in the image below. Hope this helps.
Thank you very much for your time and response! I have updated our PWA to enable top-level time reporting, however through my testing it seems that the resource must still add a task from the project to their timesheet for the summary row to appear.
I have not tried switching the default from task assignments to current projects for fear of the repercussions. I have not been able to find any guidance as to what will happen to the existing timesheets if I change this selection. Do you know if it will remove all of the tasks that resources have already added to their timesheets? Can it be undone?
I learned a valuable lesson when I changed the permissions mode in the PWA before thoroughly understanding the impact
- Charles --
Truth be known, you are venturing into "uncharted territory" with your intended use of the Timesheet functionality in PWA. All of my clients either use the Timesheet feature to capture daily time on a task by task basis, or they don't use it at all. So, I am not sure I can answer your questions. My assumption, however, is that existing timesheets would not be impacted, as the changes you make (you would need to make BOTH changes), would only impact future timesheets. That's about the best I can do for you.
However, if there is anyone in this user group that has ideas for you, I would gladly solicit their ideas. Sorry, but hope this helps.
- I also wonder if you're aware of any superior time reporting alternatives? I'm absolutely open to trying them, I was hoping to use something within Microsoft's suite.
- Nope, I am not aware of any time reporting alternatives. Sorry, but hope this helps.
CharlesB1325 Were a pretty large organization and we had the same issues. To get around this, we created two WBSs. One for timesheet reporting tasks and another for managing the project schedule.
- Very interesting! Thank you. Do you open a separate WBS for each project, or have people report time for multiple projects into the same WBS?
CharlesB1325 It varies. If it's a project with an actual schedule, or budget we create a separate project. However, if it is just to track time spend support an application/product the PM may create task to represent multiple apps/products. It really just depends on how we want to display the data in our Power BI reports.
We also do something similar where we have additional WBSs for Forecasting, Resource Allocations, etc. information. All the data: planned work/costs (by day) is pulled into our Power BI reports to generate a variety of reports.
