Evil Doctor PorkChop

To all that have written and visited in the past months, I thank you for stopping by.  I've been basically ignoring this blog due to other projects.  As I'm now a bus commuter, hopefully I can use that time to do better care and feeding of this blog. 

On to the letters....

LETTER #1

I just read your blog entry on leveraging custom fields in Project Server 2003 and I hope you can give me some advice. Our organization has been using the Project Properties metadata for reporting in Portfolio Analyzer for some time now with success, but now they want to start reporting against custom fields applied at the Task level. As you state in your article, custom fields aren't available to Portfolio Analyzer. Do you know how I can solve this problem? Would upgrading to 2007 be an option?

EDPC> Yes, upgrading is an option.  In 2007, custom fields can be added to the cube structure using the cube configuration options. 

As for 2003 cubes, check out these SDK articles on extending the OLAP cubes:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/aa168479(office.11).aspx (general overview of OLAP extensions)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/aa208428(office.11).aspx (includes how to add enterprise task outline codes in the sections for Extending Task Earned Value)

LETTER #2

...For us the separation of tasks & timesheets is an annoyance (I thought 03 handled that just fine). But the real problem is that 07's timesheets have completely eliminated the totals column!  I was hoping SP1 would correct this fairly glaring error, but apparently not.  Providing totals by task and by project for the timesheet period seems like such a basic feature of a timesheet -- why was it removed?  And how can it be put back in?  And how are people managing without it? 

EDPC>In Project 2003, we installed several ActiveX controls which desktop administrators did not like.  In Project 2007, we had an initiative to remove the ActiveX and move to DHTML grids.  In the transition, every function was not migrated.  Why totals didn't make it, I don't know since I wasn't involved in this area at the time.

As for totals, I've seen people exporting to Excel to sum the results.  This is obviously not well integrated but it does work. 

By Office definitions, adding totals would be considered a new feature which creates numerous downstream implications (documentation, support, localization, etc.)  As such, we usually don't add new features in Service Packs.  Service Packs are designed to address issues which improve the stability of the product. 

The separation of tasks and time sheets was actually a very significant request by many customers.  If you plan 30 hours of work per person but your internal billing requires 40 hours to be billed, the split entry handles this much cleaner.  One of our internal business units, who does time entry, updates the My Tasks first.  Then, they import this into the time sheet and log whatever time is remaining. 

We also have some which use the My Work view to see a calendar representation of the assigned tasks.  This can be used to update your tasks on a daily basis.  Click on the My Work header in the left hand navigation to view this page.  If people update their tasks daily and log time weekly using the import, time entry accuracy should improve.  Otherwise, we are all fiction writers at the end of the week.  I usually can't remember everything I did Monday on Wednesday!

LETTER #3

Very useful article. http://evildoctorporkchop.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!88E61D218103A246!620.entry  But what about the remainder of the workflow? Once the task has been re-assigned, it doesn't actually get into that persons task list. Any idea what steps need to be taken further?

EDPC>  All task changes have to be approved by the Project Manager of that project and the project has to be republished for the new team member to see the change.  So, have the Project Owner take a look in Task Updates, Select All and Accept.  Then have them republish the project.

Judging from the keynote, it looks like a packed house!  I'll be in the Project Labs from 11am to 1:30pm on Tuesday if you want to talk face to face.

http://blogs.msdn.com/officeoffline/default.aspx 

Especially the Project post.  :-)

That thought popped into my head as I was driving my new car up a big hill in Bellevue.  I finally traded in my 98 Volvo S70 for something a bit smaller, more economical and more fun to drive.  I'm one of the lucky 40,000 people who have bought the new Honda Fit.  For those of you outside of the US, you might know this car as the Jazz. 

My Volvo kept giving me vibes of serious issues ahead even though nothing ever broke.  Maybe Volvo had finally trained me that their cars, while good and comfortable, do tend to get a bit finicky as they get older.  Sort of like its owner.  :-)

I wasn't looking forward to a maintenance event which could easily cost more than the value of the car.  It didn't help that my wife HATED that car.  Her contention was that Volvos must be built by 6'5" engineers.  Her 5'2" frame never quite fit the seats, armrests, or headrests as intended.  So it had to go.

I went online and did the online quote thing on all of the area Honda dealers web sites.  Only two dealers got back to me.  Lynnwood Honda and Bellevue Honda.  The folks at Bellevue Honda were nice as we have the van serviced there.  Essentially though, they were marking up the Fit out of my target price range and that was a no-go.

I'm still a bit floored that dealers will provide such a mechanism for quote generation and ignore it.  What a great way to miss sales.  Things did get much better as we proceeded with the purchase.

Lynnwood Honda actually got back to me the day I submitted the quote.  The person I dealt with there was Rick Fonseca, their Internet Sales Manager.  He seemed to understand that I wanted to do this over email and call occasionally as opposed to the normal "come in and we'll talk you to death until we sell you a car" mentality that I've encountered.  If I can buy a house cross-country over email and fax, I should be able to buy a car that way.

So, Rick set me up, let me know what was coming in and gave me a very reasonable price.  As these cars are in big demand here, many dealers are marking them up well over MSRP.  The highest I've seen was $21,000 on a car that has a $16, 565 list price.  I only know this as I finally had to walk into a few dealers to get them to talk to me.  Also, many want to charge you extravagant fees for extended warranties.  The price that Rick quoted included a 7 Year, 100,000 mile powertrain warranty. 

Essentially, it was the best overall deal.  As the quote was so reasonable, I expected extraneous charges to be on the purchase order.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not the case.  The purchase went well and some minor issues were taken care of immediately.  Basically, this was the least stressful car purchase I've ever made.  They get my recommendation for where to buy your next Honda.

The next surprise was the level of service I got from Wells Fargo.  I decided to finance part of the car through Wells.  I knew they didn't have the best interest rate, but on this small sized loan, it wasn't going to be a large difference.  Also, it is just easier to manage all of your financial stuff in one place.  We had worked with Leda Alexander before for part of our house financing.  So, I called Leda to set up the auto loan.

Leda had changed positions at Wells and was doing small business banking now.  She had also moved from the branch by Microsoft to the Tukwila location, which is near Sea-Tac.  It's quite a distance from Microsoft.  You can see the distance between the two flags in the map below.  Not close by any means.  So, I half expected her to hand me off to someone else nearby. 

Instead she set up the whole loan, got the paperwork together and met us after banking hours, near our house, 18 miles from her office, so that we could sign the paperwork.  Wow.  Wow.  Wow.  Now that's customer service!  So, if you need a small business banker and you want a great person who's willing to go the extra mile to take care of your financial matters, I would highly recommend her.

Anyway, I've having fun driving the Fit with it's go-cart like handling and great gas mileage.  I'm averaging about 32 miles per gallon with a 50/50 mix of city and highway driving.  I've had it only a week and I've already put 600 miles on it.

A picture of the Fit in Vivid Blue Pearl (the color that I bought) is below. 

Having owned a Civic in the past, I knew it takes a bit of skill with your gear selection to get the most out of your 109 horsepower engine.  Yeah, I could add a turbo for $$$ to get the horsepower up to 180, but then I would just get myself in trouble.  :-)

Again, 3rd gear is your friend. 

It's been awhile since I've been on this blog.  It feels a little like walking into a relative's house that you haven't visited in a while.  You know where everything is, but it still feels a bit strange.

As you may know, I took over management of the Project Server Team Blog a few months ago.  From a blogging perspective, this has been a challenging assignment.  It's one thing to blog on your own blog, where you can pretty much do whatever.  It's another matter when you are representing the team.  Overall, I feel we are getting the posts out that need to be there, but we still have a ways to go before the pipeline is full.  I'm open to suggestions for posts.

I've also been working on Project 14 for several months.  This is my first time going through the beginning of the ship cycle process at Microsoft.  In some ways, it's very familiar and in other ways, it's different from any other software development cycle I've been through. 

One of the critical differences at Microsoft is that I really own the features for which I'm writing the specs.  It's incredibly important that I gather customer evidence, do partner research, collaborate with development, marketing, test and other Program Managers to make sure I've got all of the angles covered.  But in the end, I really own the thing.  My success at Microsoft is truly in my hands.

In other jobs I've had, I was responsible for the outcome but all of the key decisions were typically made elsewhere.  In the Microsoft model, I've got to facilitate and own these key decisions.  Given the number of years that a release is in use and the revenue that is at stake, these decisions are critical to the long term success of our product.  No pressure, though.  :-)

In my "spare" time, I'm also managing a hosted instance of Project Server 2007 internally for Microsoft employees.  This has been a challenging task.  Typically, when you implement Project Server, you have some standardization across organizations which makes it a bit easier to design a solution.  In our case, there is no cross-organization standardization.

So, we designed the solution where each group could add custom fields, resources, views and templates.  We also implemented a single level RBS which has a 4 letter abbreviation format.  The RBS is used by the groups/categories to restrict the projects and resources.  Custom fields and views are prefixed with the same 4 letter abbreviation so that these can be distinguished across groups.  Interestingly, very few(2) custom fields have been created. 

We are getting some great direct usability feedback as many of these internal users are new to Project and Project Server.  ne of the feedback items was to make it clearer as to where to see project details.  There was some confusion among new team members as to which link to use to see the project details.  They kept clicking on the link to the Project workspace to see the project.  After looking at the home page from their perspective, I can see why.  So, some changes were in order.

The quickest way to do make it easier was to add the Project Center web part to the home page.  You can also edit the web part heading to instruct the user to "Click here to see project details".  The other alternative would have required the PM to place the Project Details web part on the home page of the team site.  While it's pretty easy to do, it wasn't something I wanted to require of new users.  In the end, I put Project Center on the home page.  I also left the Project Workspaces web part below it so that users could easily navigate to the workspaces.

For fun, I'm continuing to experiment with my Zune.  (Disclaimer:  I know nothing about the internal plans for Zune.  Heck, I don't even know anyone on the team.)  It's the best video player I've ever had.  I've moved a number of videos to it and it just rocks.  I've been able to watch movies, video podcasts and recorded TV at lunch easily.  I wish it were easier to get rentable video content as I can't see buying TV episodes.  The screen is great looking.  Now, I need to find a decent case that won't cost a fortune.  Based on what I've found, I might be hard pressed to find both.  Suggestions? 

Anyway, I'm attempting to do more writing here.   Expect more behind the scenes stuff rather than hard, technical information.