Working as a PPM consultant offers me a very good opportunity to interact with many different clients, which have diverse needs and requirements. A couple of weeks ago I received a very interesting request from a company I am engaged with, regarding the utilization of custom calendars by their project managers.
Before we deep dive into their request, it is important to provide some background: by default, the PPM platform does not allow project managers to configure their own calendars when connected to PWA. The logic behind this restriction is simple: as we are using a platform to centralize and standardize our project management practices, it does not make sense that project managers can use in their projects elements that are not part of the global configuration.
If a project manager tries to modify the default calendar or create a new calendar when connected to PWA, the options will be grayed out:
Figure 1: Change Working Time Dialog
However, there are some unique scenarios in which we should be more flexible and change PWA’s configuration to allow certain things that were not planned. And here we go back to my client’s requirement.
They are a large service provide company, working in the metallurgical industry. Their work consists on machine revitalization, also known as retrofit. They have clients all over the United States, as well as in other countries in both Central and South America. In their project management process, as soon as new retrofit contract is signed a new project is created on their PPM platform (in their case, Project Online).
As their projects will happen in the most diverse cities, it is very common that the schedules are developed taking into consideration particularities and restrictions imposed by clients, including things such as local holidays, plants that will be temporarily closed for maintenance, unavailability of key staff members that are involved in the project and so on.
When we have scenarios such as this, it is very hard to keep the administration of the company’s calendars under Project Online’s admin responsibility. Worse, even though we would like to keep the standards and ask Project Online’s admin to create the calendars as they are requested by project managers, we should consider if this is a worth effort, since most likely the calendars will be used exclusively in each project – which means that in most of the cases they will be useless for other projects.
To allow project managers to create their own calendars based upon the requirements they have, as a PWA admin, navigate to PWA Settings. Under the Operational Policies section click Additional Server Settings. Then, in the Enterprise Setting subsection, make sure to check the Allow projects to use local base calendars option:
Figure 2: Additional Server Settings page
Click Save. Once this option is enabled, project managers will have the ability to create their own calendars:
Figure 3: Change Working Time dialog (creating a new Calendar)
Project managers will have the opportunity to create their calendars as a copy of an enterprise calendar (so they can take the advantage to include all the existing exceptions) or create a new blank base calendar:
Figure 4: Create a new calendar dialog
In this example, let’s say that the project will happen in Brazil, so we need to use the national holidays that are stablished for the country. We can then create a new base calendar and add the exceptions as needed:
Figure 5: New local calendar created
To wrap-up this post, I just wanted to make some considerations:
Figure 6: Unable to add calendar to Enterprise
So, tell me about your experience working with calendars in the PPM platform. Have you ever needed to create local calendars in your projects? Feel free to reach out and let’s chat.
