Default Assignment Owner

There are situations where the team members that are doing the actual work on tasks do not have ready access to a computer. This makes their use of Project Server Web Access to report status on their task assignments impossible or at least highly unlikely. In the past situations like this would require assigning the tasks to a supervisor and then having the supervisor submit status for the resources. But this was not a great solution as it obscured the usage levels of the actual resources and was confusing for the supervisor to keep track of who was assigned to any given task. Project Server 2007 adds a feature that makes this kind of situation much easier to handle.

Every Assignment on a project in Project Server has a property called "Assignment Owner" that contains the name of the Project Server user that will be entering status updates for that assignment. If the Assignment Owner for an assignment is "Brian Kennemer" then it will show up on my "My Tasks" page in PWA. Every resource in Project Server has a property called "Default Assignment Owner." This property defines the default name that is put into the Assignment Owner field when that resource is assigned to a task. By default it is the name of the resource but you can put any active user into the field for a resource. So in our situation above the solution would be to put the name of the supervisor into the Default Assignment Owner field for each of their team members. Then whenever a task is assigned to one of the team members that assignment will show up on the My Tasks page of the supervisor.

With this solution the tasks are assigned to actual team members so their usage and availability can be accurately tracked and the assignments show up on the supervisors My Tasks page for easy status updates (the name of the assigned resource shows up in the view to help the supervisor keep track.)

If you have this situation in your deployment look into this feature. If you need a hand drop me an email.

Comments

[Sara]

To answer M's question, I believe that is a NO. It only shows up on your My Tasks page. We have ran into this issue many times where the assignment owner was set to someone else and because of that the Import Timesheet function didn't work for that user. There was no tasks in the My Tasks page for the time to import to.

Brian, Do you know if there are any issues out there now regarding the assignment owner getting changed somehow? I know that it can be changed manually, but any chance of a system bug causing it to be changed automatically?

[Marijana]

Do assignments show up in My Tasks view for every team mebmer also (assigned resource), not just their supervisor (Asignment Owner)? For example, if I'm AO for TASK1 that has assigned resource JOHN SMITH, does this task show up in My Tasks view and in John's My Task's view?
Thanks,
M