Has anyone ever found a good use for Parent Role?
- No out of the box reports, portlets or metrics use Parent Role that I'm aware of
- No means of preventing resources from being added to Parent Roles, when assigning Primary Roles, only, is required - all roles (I.e. primary, parents, grandparents) show on Primary Role, Team Role (Staff OBS) and Task Role pick lists.
- Although one can have more than two levels defined (e.g a parent can have its own parent (grand-parent role) and a grand parent role can have its own parent (great grand-parent), there are no out of the box views of this hierarchy nor out of the box processes that automatically build a Role OBS from this data (unlike Departments and Locations)
I'm about to recommend abandoning the Parent Role attribute, eliminating parent role values altogether and removing the attribute from views, filters, etc.
What to use in its place? A custom Role OBS.
- Can force that roles be placed on end-branches
- Only primary roles will be available on Resource Create/Edit screens for assignment to resources (Poke-Yoke'd)
- Can have more that two levels defined
- Role OBS shows up as an attribute that can be added to views, filters
- Role OBS can be exported to Excel, then imported to Visio to see hierarchy structure
Had thought about building a process to generate the Role OBS from the Parents assigned to roles, just as Department and Location OBSs are built. But, there is still then the problem of not being able to limit role selection to primary roles when assigning to resources.
Seems to me that Parent Role has negative value, that a Role OBS meets our needs better.
Anyone have a different experience? We're about to use primary roles a lot more seriously than in the past, for planning and costing projects - perhaps Parent Role meant something more in the past, before CA PPM generated OBS attributes that can be displayed in views. Today, it appears to me that a Role OBS can obsolete the Parent Role attribute.
What do you think?
Dale