Dear Community Members,
In this week's Learn PPM with Rego, we'll explore five CA PPM questions and answers.
1. Why are our costs wrong on the Gantt Chart?
2. Why are our Actuals inaccurate?
3. Can you use a grid of Task Names to validate predecessors and successors with Open Workbench Dependency Views?
4. Is there a way to resolve Process delays?
5. Why do our SSO email links redirect users to the wrong page?
Please feel free to comment on any alternative answers you've found. We love your input (always).
1. Why are our costs wrong on the Gantt Chart: Task Total and Baseline Total? (CA PPM 14.2)
Answer
If the ACWP (actual cost) doesn't display properly on the baseline view or the Gantt task view, it's showing a “Prorated” amount. Keep in mind that ACWP is an earned value attribute, so that logic comes into play.
Normally, your transaction dates are in the past, but in testing, we've seen a client create a $25K transaction. Following all the posting and other jobs of the day, the ACWP got prorated for part of the day, due to internal coding tied to CA PPM EV processing.
When you post a transaction on the same day as the transaction date, CA PPM prorates the transaction amount for a portion of that day. This proration will only happen under these circumstances: transaction date = today’s date or future date. So the probability of this occurring is rare.
You can fix this problem by updating the baseline to today's date and rerunning all the pertinent jobs.
Following an upgrade and data migration of two weeks worth of timesheets, our PTO hours were not being counted by the PTO Portlet. Adjustments were made to the totals as a workaround. A week ago, following a system adjustment, the “missing” hours were being counted, so the Support team was forced to make adjustments to the totals again. Unfortunately, this morning, it's no longer counting the PTO for those two weeks.
The Support team has spent an inordinate amount of time on this since the data migration, and more importantly, we are wasting our end-user’s time. The client PTO policy is to use their annual PTO time or lose it, so having accurate PTO information is essential, particularly at this time of year.
This is symptomatic as there are other areas of 13.3 where the Actuals are not being seen as they should, which is causing problems in reporting for Senior Management too. Any help you can provide is appreciated.
This particular scenario was a time slice setup issue, with a slice date starting in mid-November we adjusted to the 1st of the year to accommodate particular reporting needs. We made other slice recommendations as well, based on their requirements and best practice. (check the attachment: Erroneous_Actuals.docx)
3. Can you format Open Workbench Dependency Views based on Task Names, instead of ID's? We want to validate predecessors and successors in a grid or list and get away from the Gantt or graphical format.
The “Dependency Definition” view should do the trick.
4. Is there a way to resolve process delays of 1-10 minutes? (There shouldn't be hanging processes because the system is new.)
For this client, we set the Bind Address in the NSA and restarted all CA PPM services.
5. We have an SSO environment. When a user clicks on a URL within an email, expecting to go to their timesheet page, they're directed to the "Overview-General" page. This only occurs when CA PPM is not open. Is this expected behavior?
Yes, this is expected behavior. If you're using SP initiated SSO, the deep links don’t work. With SP, users hit stock URLs and are redirected back to the identity provider.
However, if IDP SSO is used, there is a possibility the deep link might work if the CA SiteMinder team has set up NSA properties. IDP gives you an internal URL that produces SAML and sends an authenticated user to the service.
We recommend contacting the CA SiteMinder team and verifying OOTB Action Item deep links work, for starters.
Feel free to share your feedback and thanks for participating.
Your guide,
The Rego Team