Clarity

We are exploring the impact of Work Shifts in the integration with MSP. 

We changed the wortk shifts of 5 days of the Standard Calendar (Novembre 6th to 10th).

The default shifts are:

8:00 - 12:00

13:00 - 17:00

The new shifts for those dates are:

8:00 - 12:00

13:00 - 19:00  (2 aditional hours)

Ran the Time Slicing job, and then created new tasks "before" those dates, "within" those dates, and "after" those dates. However, the 3 tasks have the same hour in the Start Date and Finish Date fields.All of them are starting at 8:00 and finishing at 17:00 hrs. 

The Work Shift didint change anything.

The tasks hs no resources.

Any ideas wether this is an expected resutl or a bug ?

Hi Juan,

This appears to be a defect that has been fixed in 15.4.

I was able to reproduce this issue on 15.2, but I tested in 15.4 with the new driver and the issue was no longer happening there.

By design, the shifts set in the PPM Standard Calendar should be exported to MSP in the Default start Time and Default end time fields in File->Options->Schedule. In my 15.2 testing, this wasn't happening, which was causing the task finish dates to not reflect the 7 pm end time. In 15.4, Default start time and Default end times were correctly exporting from the Standard calendar so the Task Finish date end times were then showing correctly as 7 pm. 

If you do still see any issues with this in 15.4 or if you were seeing this issue with the legacy driver and not the new driver, please let me know.

Regards,

Kristin

Good to know Kristin. However, my test is simpler than that.

We are looking at the Date-Times within CA PPM only.

Do you think is right that the columns "PRTASK.prstart" and "PRTASK.prfinish" columns in the database shows always 8:00 hrs and 17:00 hrs even after changing the Calendar Work Shifts ?

The ultimate target is actually to export them to MSP, but so far we are analyzing CA PPM stand-alone.

Hi Juan,

I checked and from what I can see in both the database and task list views, it does always show those 8:00 hrs and 17:00 hrs. The seems to be similar to a project, where the project start time defaults to 8:00 and end time is 17:00 hrs. The only option to update the task times appears to be to change the tasks manually by changing the 'Date/Time Format Scale' of the Start/Finish dates of the tasks to 'Day/Time' and then manually updating the time stamps of the task dates to match the calendar.

I did notice an exception in some scenarios when you add an assignment to the task and the resource's calendar work shift end time does not match the task end time, but it's not consistent.

Regards,

Kristin

Kristin:

Do you believe this is a bug or it was designed that way?

If it is by design, we don't see the reason behind this yet.

Juan

Hi Juan,

I did some digging and found that this is by design if there are no resources. Here's an excerpt from the documentation that I found: Define Project Estimates (ETC) - CA PPM - 15.4 - CA Technologies Documentation 

Clipping of Task Time

The start and finish time for all new tasks is fixed from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. However, standard calendar work shifts can cause a task start and finish time to be clipped inward once it is assigned, but never outward. For example, say that you have shifts that last from 7:00 am to 4:00 pm. When you first create a task, it is set to 8:00 am to 5:00 pm. If you then assign the task, the task finish time is clipped to 4:00 pm (inward clip). The task start time is not reset to 7:00 am (outward clip). The inward clipping of a task time can result in the ETC being different from what you expected.

So, the one way to change the task start/end times is if you have assignments and the resource's shifts fall under the above scenario where the time of the task is brought inward (but can't be brought out)

Regards,

Kristin

Thank you Kristin. I understand.

What I see is that in a web-based Gantt planning, is hard for users to visualice this gap unless they change the date format to "Day time" in the Tasks List view. (We noticed that "Day time" format is not available in the Gantt view).

Also, this could cause problems to the integration with MS Project, since the default Start Time of MSP tasks could be different than 8:00 AM, but the user cannot asure that Tasks coming from CA PPM will have the desired workshift start time.

In summary, PPM users will have to deal with 3 different Start Times:

• CA PPM base calendar (work shift' Start Time)
• CA PPM resource calendar (work shift' Start Time)
• and the Default Start Time = 8:00 AM, which does not have a business reason.

I appreciate your answer.

For now, it seems something to be aware of and to warn users.

Best regards!