Cost Plans' (Apparent) Requirement for Loc and Dept View

[Will Lloyd]

I'm in the process of reviewing and refining aspects of our security model. I came across an ungraceful way of solving a problem, but I'm wondering if there is another way to accomplish what I have in mind.

 

We allow - and suggest - that our Project Managers develop their own Cost Plans, either from Manual, Allocation or Assignment. Regardless of the method, if Location or Department are selected as Cost Plan Grouping Attributes, these become required attributes within the Plan. Therefore, in order to allow PMs to enter or look up a valid value for these fields, I need to provide both 'Location - View - All' and 'Department - View - All' to their privilege Group.

 

Adding 'Location - View - All' to their Group is innocuous (there are no impacts on menus) but adding 'Department - View - All' creates the Home -> Organization -> Departments on the users' menu. My issue is that access to the Department data is what is needed, but I anticipate questions from users as to why they need that given, new menu entry - to which the answer is, "You don't". Not tough to explain; just tiresome.

 

My question is, is there a way of providing non-Administrators access to the Department list without affecting their Application menu?

[Kathryn Ellis]

The easiest way to populate the cost plan with some departments/locations without having to explicitly give them view access to select them from the lookup is to populate the cost plan by Staff.

This may only be an issue if there might be a department/location combination that is not covered by one of the staffed members and you want to add a manual row to the plan.  

If you are looking at Actuals on a cost plan grouped by department/location, be sure that you understand which department / location is used for posting actuals.

Reference the following article:

Project Financial Cost Plans show Actuals grouped - CA Knowledge 

[Will Lloyd]

Thanks Kathryn,

 

I'll review the KB document and investigate further.

 

Cheers,

Will