Clarity

For some projects, the changes done in MS Project is not saving to the Clarity database even though MS Project says the project has been successfully saved. The Cost Plan always picks up the resource allocations and costs from the older@ plan. We are using MS Project 2013 and Clarity 13.3.

@scheduleconnectissues

What exactly is happening? I assume you are using MSP 2013 and not SP1, because SP1 is not supported at 13.3?

Anyway, depending on how you are doing your forecast in MSP you may be running into one of several defects we have encountered, but without more detail, it is hard to tell.

How do you do your forecast in MSP?

how are you then creating cost plans form that forecast in Clarity?

When you reopen your project in MSP, is the forecast correct? ( again, depending on what you are doing, defects exist around this)

Are you using Fixed duration, units or work?

ETc

the more information you can provide, we might be able to help more.

We went through the issue of MSP 2013 SP1 and then we got a corrected patch and that issue was resolved.

Our PMs usually build the project plan in MS Project 2013. Most of the times, it is Fixed Duration Activities. The resources are allocated to the teams in Clarity and they are assigned activities in MSP.

Once the resources are assigned to the activities in the MSP, the PMs save the work to Clarity from the Schedule Connect Plug-in. They then refresh or Create a new Cost Plan and "Populate from Task Assignment".

This arrangement has been working for us for years. Off late we have started noticing the issue that I have highlighted in my first post. When PMs save their projects to Clarity through the Plug-in, it says it is saved through the Pop up in MSP, but actually it would not have saved any of the changes. If we go to Task tab-> Assignments in Clarity, the changes would not have reflected. As a work around, when we are assigning resources to tasks through Clarity, it is saving the information.

This inconsistency in saving changes from MSP to Clarity is causing us a lot of user dissatisfaction and of course more admin work.

When you do the assignments in MSP, are you entering the Work values in the TSV or are you just entering a total number in the Work field and letting MSP spread it out?  We enter our in the TSV and that is where there are several issues, especially if you cross years- -it sets the forecast to 0 and puts a huge sum at the end of a month:)   Also, if you use TSV, you will see where it wipes out or reduces one month/week (your TSV setting) and pushes it out to the next available month. Lastly, if you ever do use Fixed loading pattern in Clarity, if you don't have the registry file, it will wipe out your forecast in MSP ( the work values in the TSV) and shove them all up into one month........... it is a big mess... However, we used fixed work, but not all the issues are related to fixed work.

You may need to contact support, as I had to work with them for months to determine my issues on 13.3.   No fix for us until 14.2 patch 5 (not out yet) , supposedly, so we are upgrading as our cost plans take a huge hit with these defects.

On the projects that are not saving back to CA PPM, is the user saving a copy of the MSP schedule to their local drive before saving it to CA PPM?