Clarity

Are there any active users in the community who are using Clarity MSP integration without issues and with full detailed project schedule? 

As PMs are regularly facing one or other issues with the integration, our PMO is thinking of dropping  the idea of having full detailed schedule in clarity via MSP integration, rather just store as a file in collaboration store. Tasks tab to have only high level milestones and dependency tasks. Thought of checking in this community how this is being handled for other organisations.

Regards

Praneeth

I've tried to deploy the MSP Interface in the past, but it resulted in a massive increase in calls to the support team.  The main reason is because of 'unexpected' results being displayed in MSP - i.e. user issues, rather than technical ones.

I did it successfully in two organisations. The first, the requirement was only that PMs manage (very) high-level timesheet tasks and reporting milestones in their 'PPM MSP' plan (we left it to them to maintain their detailed plan elsewhere).  The second - and more successful - was when we provided the projects with a professional planner/scheduler who understood the intricacies of the PPM/MSP interface.

Honestly, unless you have a burning need to do effort-based planning & tracking at the detailed task level, I'd give it a miss. Too many PMs simply have neither the time nor the desire to learn how the interface works under the hood, and far too many don't really understand how MSP works either.

AlistairMiller - Thanks for your reply. Agree with your comments. Though we have one master scheduler, it is hard even for that resource to manage these issues if the number of projects are increasing. We were thinking of just having timesheet tasks in Clarity and also log project dependency tasks in Clarity. Full detailed MPP schedule will be stored as a document in Collaboration store.

Yep, I think that's about the best way to start. You get the things that are important to governance groups (milestones, dependencies), without trying to train your PMs on the intricacies and frustrations of effort-driven planning & tracking, and the effects on their MSP schedules.

Our customers struggle with this every day.  We made a major investment last year (multiple thousands of hours) to create our own interface to fix these problems.  Check out the following webinar:

MSP Integration Webinar 

Thanks,

Josh