ProjectLoad Blog

Most companies have holidays throughout the year such as New Year’s, Memorial Day, and Labor Day that occur on specific dates. These can be accounted for in many different ways within ProjectLoad, but a couple of methods appear to have some distinct advantages.

One way to make life easier for the staff and the administrator is to treat each Holiday as a separate project. In this approach, the administrator sets up a project for 2006 New Year’s Day with an appropriate start and end date such as 01/02/06 and 01/02/06 and no estimated hours. Then they add a phase with the name “Holiday” and let the dates default from the project. Once the phase is in place the administrator must manually add one activity for each person in the company. Fortunately, the system will automatically put in the dates and name of the activity, but the administrator would need to add eight hours in the estimated hours field. Although this part is laborious, it makes everything easier from here on.

Once the New Year’s Day project is in place, the administrator can use the Copy function (from the project editor or the projects page) and copy the project to create another holiday such as 2006 Memorial Day. During the copy process the administrator simply renames the project, specifies all phases and activities should be copied (including their estimates), and tells the system to move the estimated dates forward to the correct dates (05/29/06). This process will create the next holiday project and assign everyone automatically.

Using this method means the administrator only has to set everyone up one time. It also means everyone will have an activity with the right dates and reserved hours so the system will automatically include the data in their workload forecast and place it on their timesheets on the appropriate day. All the staff need do is fill in the eight hours in their timesheet and close the activity when they have entered the time for that holiday.

New employees will have to add themselves to the remaining holidays for the year (unless the administrator does it for them). As employees leave the company, their future activities will automatically close when they are deactivated. This also means that next year the administrator can create the holiday projects by copying the last one from the current year. Thus the administrator should only have to suffer the laborious process of mass assigning everyone to a holiday one time.

Generally, there are no end-of-year tasks associated with ProjectLoad. It is designed to be continuously updated so routine tasks such as adding or removing personnel, running reports, and closing pay periods occur on an on-going basis. However, some companies have found it helpful to break up on-going tasks into fiscal year projects.

For example, if your company has a generic administration project for people to charge time against as they do administrative tasks throughout the year, that project can be left open indefinitely or closed each year and a new one opened. There are pros and cons to each approach. The advantages to closing a routine project each year and opening a new one are:

• If employees are creating distinct activities for specific tasks under the project, closing the project at the end of the year creates a fresh project for people to attach activities to. This can help make the project easier to manage since it doesn’t accumulate a large number of closed activities over many years.
• Having a separate project for each year may make it easier to generate certain totals only reports, but given that the reporting system allows users to span any time frame and cross year boundaries, this advantage is fairly slim.

The disadvantages of closing a routine project each year are:

• Those employees who have been keeping an on-going activity open will have to create a new activity since closing a project will close all of its underlying activities
• Certain reports may be more difficult to obtain since the hours associated with the on-going project will be split across more than one project if a report spans more than one year.
• If there are a large number of support projects to be closed and rebuilt, this can be a laborious task.

In general, it is best to treat projects as independent of year end boundaries. For a standard project (one with an actual start and end date), most people do not choose to artificially break the project apart based on when the fiscal year happens to end. The reports in ProjectLoad allow the user to generate figures as to how many hours were spent in each fiscal year without having to break the project apart. The same logic applies to on-going projects. Instead of closing a project each year and opening a new one that is intended to track the same type of work (such as routine maintenance of a system), it is usually best to just leave it open and report the hours across the year boundaries or within year boundaries as desired.

To help with the issues identified above, here are some tips for the project manager:

• If you choose to close on-going projects and open new ones each year, then before closing last year’s project, copy it to next year’s project. The copy function (available from the project editor or projects page) includes options to copy phases and/or activities, adjust dates and estimated hours, and rename the project during the copy process. Using this function when closing an on-going project at the end of the year will automatically create a new activity for each employee who had an open activity in the old project.
• Use a naming convention that will help people to group the projects across year boundaries. For example, if there is an on-going maintenance project to support the XYZ Computer Program and it has a short name of XYZ-SUP, you might want to name the next year’s version XYZ-SUP-06. This will let people who wish to run a report on the support for that system specify “XYZ-SUP*” in the short name search field so they can locate all projects for that system. Note that for reporting purposes this is still not as effective as simply keeping the support project open, but it helps makes the hours easier to locate.
• The major drawback to leaving an on-going project open is the accumulation of closed activities over the years. A new capability in the project detail report automatically collapses phases so the actuals and estimates can be seen without having to drill into the lists of activities underneath. This same change will be added to the project editor in the coming months.

In general, ProjectLoad is intended to track the workload of the entire staff and organize it into projects and activities. Since the workload doesn’t stop and start based on the fiscal year, ProjectLoad has very little connection with the fiscal year concept. Thus there is generally very little that needs to be done at the end of each year.