Project Partners Blog

In looking at various clients who are using or trying to use workplan functionality in Oracle Project Management (PJT), I find that the biggest issue people face (after they get all the right patches needed to get workplans to work correctly) is getting actuals to map into planned resources correctly. If this is not done correctly, based on the client needs, then what you get is a bunch of unplanned actual assignments that increase the cost of the project on the workplan as the planned amounts on the planned assignments do not get reduced correctly by the actuals.There are some basic points to remember when defining which planning resources you use in order to get actuals to map correctly to them.

1. All resources assigned to the workplan tasks have the following attributes on them:
   1. Resource Class
   2. Organization_ID (Expenditure Org)
   3. Default Expenditure Type
2. Now if the resource formats you use do not include the Organization or expenditure type on them, these values will be defaulted to each task assignment you make as follows:
   1. The Project/Task Organization defaults as the expenditure Organization unless it can derived from some other attribute of the resource such as the named persons assigned organization or the assigned organization from the Non-Labor Resource.
   2. The default expenditure type assigned to the resource class in the resource class setup is defaulted to the expenditure type on the assignment.
3. None of the other resource attributes are defaulted to the assignment unless they are a part of the resource definition (based on the resource format). Now this is done to allow Oracle to automatically compute the burden cost (from the raw cost calculated) and this needs expenditure type and org as these are the 2 main dimensions used in the setup of burden schedules.
4. The following issues can arise due to this defaulting:
   1. If the project/task organization is not setup as an expenditure organization, no actuals will ever map to the planning resources as actuals always have a different expenditure organization.
   2. If you have actuals coming in with different expenditure types for the same basic planned resource, only those actuals with the same expenditure type as the one defaulted to the task assignment will map to the planned resource. All others will show up as unplanned actuals.
5. Finally here are some rules to follow in order to get your actuals to always map to the planned resources as intended:
   1. If there is any possibility that the expenditure organization of actuals will be different from the that of the project/task, include organization into the your resource formats making people plan by the correct org and hence the actuals will map correctly
   2. Include Financial Category (Oracle speak for Expenditure type, Expenditure Category) into your resource formats. Now if you don’t care for burden cost on the workplan, then the suggestion will be to not setup a default Expenditure type on the resource class setup and then it will be not default to the task assignment and hence should not screw up your mapping.

That’s it for now and remember:
There is no better way to manage a business than to Manage by Project.

PS: I welcome all comments / trackbacks / pingbacks / queries to my nascent venture here. I will try and respond to your comments, etc in future entries.

A constant need for Project based organizations is the need for their project systems to provide them with automated alerts for significant events in their projects execution. These events may have occurred during the normal course of business or may be upcoming.

Currently all parties involved need to troll through reports to find this information and this can be a time consuming process especially in high volume businesses. Oracle Family Pack M and onwards has taken a first step in this direction with the Exceptions functions in Oracle Project Management, but these are fairly limited in scale to what is needed.

The following discussion provides a framework for project based organization to implement automatic event alerts.

The requirements for this function can be listed as follows:

1. Capture different type of events as follows

a. Date based events: Upcoming/Past Due Task/Deliverable/Milestone Dates, etc

b. Financial events: Actuals a % of budget, Revenue accrual % of funding, etc.

c. Administrative events: New Projects being activated, Projects being closed, Bids awarded, etc.

2. Allow for user specification of events that need to be captured allowing entry of a benchmark (to be compared against: e.g., 80% of budget, milestone upcoming within 30 days) and also an additional benchmark for escalation.

3. For each event specified allow for defining a periodicity for the event that determines how often the system will check for the occurrence of the event.

4. For each event specify a list of people/roles that need to be notified and a separate list for escalations.

5. Email notifications to be sent out for events captured; to avoid email overload, group all event notifications by person, project, event type and send 1 email per person across projects.

In order to handle the execution of this function, it is envisioned that a batch process that runs daily will look for enabled events and check for their occurrence based on the periodicity defined. This is true for Date and Financial Events. Every occurrence of the event for all projects is captured in a holding object (table) along with a list of persons to be notified for the event. Once all the events are processed, the batch program groups events by person and additional grouping criteria as needed and sends 1 email to each person.

Administrative events cannot be handled by the batch process, especially if no history is maintained for the underlying data elements. In such cases, we can use functions like Oracle Alerts or DB Triggers to capture the events as they occur and store the information in the holding table. These records will then be processed for email notification along with other events by the daily batch process run.

Project Partners is in the process of designing such a solution for our clients. If you are interested in this function, please contact us.

That’s it for now and remember:

There is no better way to manage a business than to Manage by Project.

PS: I welcome all comments / trackbacks / pingbacks / queries to my nascent venture here. I will try and respond to your comments, etc in future entries.