15 Best Practices for Using Microsoft Office Project with CA Clarity

By Rich Guard

Using Microsoft Office Project in an enterprise environment is significantly more complex than using it in a stand-alone environment. Few project managers are equipped with the knowledge and experience to properly use Microsoft Project where it is integrated with an enterprise class application such as Clarity. This knowledge gap has severely impacted user adoption, ROI and overall implementation success with Clarity.

There are key areas where users need to be aware of integration issues, system set up, and feature and functionality compatibilities. To completely understand these issues and avoid risks, it is a good idea to get your project managers trained in the building and maintaining of project plans in Clarity.

When you do work out your integration and functionality issues, there are some suggestions for getting the most out of your Microsoft Project and Clarity applications. Here are 15 best practices you can follow:

• Plan the level at which you intend to track work. Use tasks that reflect real work to which resources will track time.
• Open the plan by launching Microsoft Project from Clarity (via the Project Overview page), and make on-going changes to the plan.
  
• Once you open the plan from Clarity and want to save changes, select Save to Clarity from the Integration toolbar or the Microsoft Project Menu.
• To release the lock on a project in Clarity, close the project in Microsoft Project. If more than one person has plan modification rights, retain the lock on the project to prevent data loss.
• To add a resource/role in the Clarity Project Team, go to the Staff page and then assign them to tasks in Microsoft Project. The filter options are better on the Staff page.
  
• Use the Open from Clarity and Save to Clarity options while working connected to Clarity. The Open and Save commands in Microsoft Project do not save to the repository.
• Clarity does not mark tasks complete if the Remaining Work hours have been expended or Remaining Work is manually changed to zero. The Work Complete is then 100%, but the Complete task must be manually changed to 100% and Status changed to Complete.
  
• Setting task duration to zero will automatically convert it to a Milestone.
• Microsoft Project will allow you to save multiple baselines. Clarity version 7.5.2 and later supports the setting of multiple baselines. Earlier versions of Clarity only supported one (latest) baseline for your project.
• Remaining Work and Estimated Time of Completion on tasks that were due to complete during timesheet period will be pushed out to the next period. If those tasks are completed, Project Managers should review Actuals posted, zero out remaining work, change the Finish Date to the date work was completed, and mark task Status as complete.
• When a task is started (actual hours have been charged to the task), Clarity sets the percentage complete for that task to 1%.
• DO NOT delete any task to which Actuals have been posted. This will cause the task to re-appear in your plan under the Deleted Tasks summary task.
• If you do delete a task, use the "drag and drop" feature to drag the task from the Deleted Tasks phase, and drop it back into the task's original position in the schedule.
• Do not "Cut and Paste" in Microsoft Project, use "drag and drop" to move tasks around. Cutting and pasting creates orphan tasks and will add duplicates of the tasks when you open from Clarity. This also creates new tasks Ids.
• Clarity does not accept tasks with work and no resource or role. Wait to add the work estimate until you know a role or resource.

To learn more best practices on using Microsoft Project with Clarity, visit our web site at www.xinify.com or email Rich Guard, Xinify Program Director, to rich.guard@xinify.com.