Group Cost Plans by Phases in Project Schedules

[Anon Anon]

Hi All,

 

Just wondering if anyone knows if it's possible to set-up the Cost Plan object with the ability to group by phases in the schedule. Essentially I want to give all projects a template that comes with [Phase 1], [Phase 2], [Phase 3], etc, as the standard phases at WBS level one in the schedules. I would then like to track forecasted spending in the cost plan against these phases rather than by the grouping attributes available by default.

 

The other option is to build a portlet, but I'm not sure how to go about recreating a portlet that formats itself like the Cost/Benefit/Budget plan pages.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Matthew

[Andrew M]

Matthew,

 

if the organisation isn't using charge code, then you could use that to tag tasks with phases.

If you then used assignments on these tasks, then generated from that with charge code as the grouping it would give you a nice "phased" cost plan.

 

I don't know of any other way of doing it, other than what I've said above or your suggestion of a portlet.

[Anon Anon]

Hi Andy,

 

Sorry the late reply. Yeah that sucks. We are using charge code but some can't be split out to differentiate by phase so that's no good. I guess the portlet option works.

 

I've been playing around with it and the only part I'm having troublew with is the Actuals and EAC rollup. Do you (or I'm putting this forward to anyone reading) know if it's possible to do a roll-up in a Hierarchical Portlet/Query without accessing everything in the hierarchy? By that I mean, is it possible to do a phase roll-up of actuals/eac if you haven't accessed the lower parts (tasks and activities) in the query? I'm returning a subquery that provides Labor Actuals, Non-Labor Actuals, Labor ETCs, Non-Labor ETCs for each task in the project, but when I just get the hierarchy in the query to show Project -> WBS Level 1, it doesn't seem to remember quite well which WBS Level 1 task it's attached to, and I don't think each row in the PRTASK table stores every parent WBS Level. I don't currently have access to the DB (Sydney migration, yay!) so I can't test it.

 

I will get back to this thread with an answer and a query eventually!