Two of my fellow PMs walked through this with me today and I almost fell out of my chair in my excitement.
 
If you've ever attempted to manage a single large project with multiple project managers, you will find this very interesting.  The whole time we were going through this, I was thinking of my old co-worker Doug, who had a project with 12 or so work teams.  This would have been perfect for him.

 

PROJECT 2002/2003 
As you may or may not know, in Project Server 2002/2003, there is a project owner and an assignment owner.  The project owner is typically, but not always, the person who created the project.
 
The assignment owner receives and approves any updates for owned assignments in the project plan.  Most of the time, the assignment owner is the same as the project owner and all is well in the world. 
 
Now, say you have a big project plan and you want your team leads to manage their parts of the plan.  To do this in Project 2002/2003, you have to:

This method had some issues.  First, you could accidentally take ownership of someone else's task, since you couldn't see or explicitly set the assignment owner value.  Second, only one person could be in the project at a time to process updates as update processing required Project Pro.  Lastly, everyone had to have Project Pro installed and had to know how to use it.

 

This original article can be found at http://spaces.msn.com/evildoctorporkchop.

Consequently, this method required the Project owner to became a traffic cop.  They would have to manage when each team lead could do their updates.  The PM also had to usually create a task owner custom field to distinguish tasks. 

 

In the end, most PMs I knew would create separate project plans for each team lead and would use a master plan to tie them together.
 
PROJECT 12

With Project 12, it becomes much easier to distribute work management while maintaining a single plan.

There were specific needs that were addressed in P12.  First, there was a need for team managers to be able to manage the detailed work for their teams without the Project Manager involvement.  Next, there was a need to enable project resource planning through the whole project cycle, from initial concept to execution.  Lastly, there was a need to allow different levels of management to participate in the planning based on the point in the project cycle. 

 

Now, in Project Pro, Assignment owner is split into two user accessible columns called Assignment Owner and Status Manager. 

 

The Status Manager task field allows you to explicitly designate the resource responsible for processing the updates for assignments on a given task.  The field can contain the name of any enterprise work resource on the project plan resource sheet.   In one scenario, the PM knows the Server team will have certain tasks on the plan.  The PM can delegate management of those tasks to the Server team manager.  She does this by making the Server team manager the Status Manager for those assignments at the task level.  The Server team manager can then delegate the tasks, monitor progress and process updates using PWA.

 

The Assignment Owner task field is used to override the default assignment owner of a resource.  You will see assignment owner used in two places so let's clarify the difference.

 

First, Assignment Owner exists now in the resource record.  If you went to the conference or talked to someone who did, you might know that we added a default assignment owner field to resources.  This enables you to assign a "assignment monitor" to a team or generic resource.  The Assignment owner can see the assignments for a resource and can delegate them as if they were that resource.  If you have created one of the new Team Assignment Pool resources for your team, you might consider designating the team manager as the default assignment owner for the team resource.  When configured this way, the team manager receives all team assignments.  This is the configuration we will assume below.

 

Secondly, Assignment Owner also exists in the project plan task.  If you specify the Assignment Owner in the task, it will override the default Assignment Owner of the resource.  I'll cover a scenario where you might want to use this next.

 

Let's assume that Contoso widget team is planning Release XYZ.  We have three levels of management, the Group Program Manager(GPM), the Lead Program Managers(Leads) and the Program Managers(PgM).  There are team assignment pool resources set up for each group of PgMs where the Lead is the default assignment owner.

 

The project manager for the release will work initially with the GPM to layout the overall structure of the plan and to perform high level task team assignments.  By this, I mean the tasks will be assigned to the Team Assignment Pool Resources.  Since the project manager and the GPM are not yet ready to involve the Leads, the Assignment Owner for those tasks with team assignments will be set tot he GPM.  This way the project manager can do initial planning while providing the GPM with visibility but not spam anyone else with preliminary details.

 

Once the project progresses to approval, the project manager will begin planning with the Leads.  At this point, the Assignment Owner in the project plan will be cleared.  This will allow the default assignment owner (the Leads) to begin receiving the team assignments.  Note, if you had other levels involved in the planning, you could also set it to another manager.  The project manager will also set the value of the task Status Manager to the appropriate Lead. 

 

At this point, all work is still assigned to the team.  As project execution begins, this function enables both project manager and Lead to utilize rolling wave planning.  The project manager can continue to assign new work to the teams as needed.  The Lead can see these new tasks and delegate appropriately within the team.  The Lead can also wait until they know specifically who will perform a given task before delegating.  Once delegated, the Lead is responsible for processing all task updates via PWA for which they are the Status Manager.  If another team member needs to be on the task, the team member can also add themselves to the task.

 

By providing the Status Manager, Assignment Owner and Team Assignment Pool Resources, we are able to enable the team managers to manage the detailed work of their team, enable multiple roles to be involved with project planning and enable rolling wave planning for both project managers and team managers.

 

I'm real excited by this enhancement.  I hope you are too.