I'm writing a Project add-on (VSTO) using C#, to programatically generate an Earned Value Chart (Planned effort vs. Actual effort vs. Actual work completed), and I want to store weekly actual effort data within the Microsoft Project 2016 (MSP) file (.mpp).
In MSP: we don't need to know how much effort was spent on each activity. For this chart, I only require the actual effort for entire project for each week. We use different systems for measuring planned effort versus actual effort for each dev activity.
Sample dataset that I want to store:
Week# Hrs per week
2018-W16 900.00
2018-W17 1038.50
2018-W18 811.25
I've got solutions for deriving/storing "Planned effort" and "Actual work completed". The final piece would be solved if I could store this "Weekly actual effort" data in the MSP file.
AFAIK, and to avoid XY problem: the contraints listed below are preventing me from using built-in MSP features (to generate graph) or datastore (to store my custom data).
Constraints
Within each project plan, I cannot alter these values on existing tasks:
Resource Names,Duration,Start,Finish,Predecessor,Successor. Doing so would alter the plan and incur wrath of Architect and Project Manager upon me.Our teams' actual hours are tracked in multiple external systems (eg: VSTS, Basecamp, custom app), and isn't subject to change to support my needs.
- Extracting this data from MSP and time-tracking systems, then manually creating dataset to generate Earned Value Chart (in Excel) takes too long, want to automate this.
- Assigning time-phased actual hours onto tasks (via
View > Task Usage) has consequence of MSP automatically adjustingDurationon that task, which violates constraint above. - Tasks in MSP and items in external time-tracking systems are not mapped one-to-one. Manually deciding which hours go onto which MSP tasks is onerous and time-consuming. Storing hours with dates on MSP tasks suffers consequences mentioned in previous issue (auto-adjustment of
Duration).
Arch & PM require project setting
Auto-schedulingto be enabled. Manually-scheduled tasks are allowed, provided they are individually manually set this way (eg: manually overrideStart). I can temporarily disableAuto-schedulingduring operations (viaMicrosoft.Office.Interop.MSProject.Application.Calculation = PjCalculation.pjManual), as long as I restore it afterwards.
What I've tried
Create dummy task with
Duration = 0 days, and record hours viaView > Task Usage. When assigning any hours to this task, MSP automatically adjustsDurationaccordingly. Since this task now appears within the project plan, I suspect Arch/PM won't approve, since they make calculations fromDurationvalues in the project.Create a dummy user that isn't assigned to any tasks, and attempt to assign hours to it via
View > Resource Usage. MSP prevents this (greyed-out), until I assign user to a task. Assigning this dummy user to any task, and then assigning any hours data, will result in MSP auto-adjustingDuration.Create a dummy milestone task. Set fields:
Duration = 0,Start = last day of week,Finish = last day of week, and store the weekly actual hours in a custom field (to avoid MSP auto-adjustment ofDuration). Repeat for each week of project execution.- Technically this works, but requires user applying a filter (via
View > Data > Filter) to avoid seeing all these extra dummy tasks (one per week) appearing within the project. I'm hoping for a better solution to store this data, or a better way to hide this data from user.
- Technically this works, but requires user applying a filter (via
Examine .mpp file. Stored as binary data, which I can't decode. Attempt to learn datastore possibilities via Project Data Interchange XML Element Structure docs and MSP export to XML: I'm not seeing any fields I can use that wouldn't violate constraints listed above.
- Google-fu: my searches for
custom data storage ms projectreturns info about using custom-fields, which isn't enough to solve.
