SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

This post covers a new resource path in the OData endpoint for Microsoft’s PPM tool Project Online to give you the data you need for true resource demand for project assignments and resource engagement assignments. Before resource engagements were introduced, you could have assignments in the project plans or in the resource plans. For reporting, the data was available in the Assignments and the AssignmentTimephasedDataSet resource path feeds, normal project assignments data would be in the AssignmentWork field and resource plan work was in the AssignmentResourcePlanWork field. There was also an AssignmentCombinedWork in the AssignmentTimephasedDataSet feed that displayed the correct resource demand for the resource when you used both resource plans and project plans. The AssignmentCombinedWork field would take into account for the project resource utilisation calculation options. With the introduction of resource engagements there wasn’t a single field that gave you this same resource demand data – until now!

If you regularly view the Project OData service root URL (_api/ProjectData) you might have noticed a new feed, ResourceDemandTimephasedDataSet. This feed has the following properties:

The ResourcePlanUtilizationType type will display either a 0, 1 or 2. This is the property to indicate the project resource utilisation calculation options for the project. The enumeration for these values is below:

• o = Project Plan
• 1 = Resource Engagements
• 2 = Project Plan Until

The ResourcePlanUtilizationDate property will only contain a date when the “Project Plan Until” resource utilisation calculation option is set.

This new ResourceDemandTimephasedDataSet feed will show the true resource demand for the project resource utilisation calculation option when using both project assignments and resource engagements. Some scenarios below show when data would and wouldn’t be included in this new feed:

Scenario 1: Project plan has resource assignments and resource engagements. The “Calculate Resource Utilization from:” option is set to Project Plan. In this scenario only the project assignments will be included in the ResourceDemandTimephasedDataSet feed.

Scenario 2: Project plan has resource assignments and resource engagements. The “Calculate Resource Utilization from:” option is set to Resource Engagements. In this scenario only the resource engagement assignments will be included in the ResourceDemandTimephasedDataSet feed.

Scenario 3: Project plan has resource assignments and resource engagements. The project assignments start from the 20th November to the 10th December 2016. The Resource engagements start from the 25th November to the 20th December 2016. The “Calculate Resource Utilization from:” option is set to Project Plan until with a date set to 1st December 2016. In this scenario only the project assignments will be included from the 20th November 2016 up to and including the 1st December 2016 and only resource engagement assignments from the 2nd December to 20th December 2016  will be included in the ResourceDemandTimephasedDataSet feed.

Example data can be seen below:

That makes things far easier for reporting resource demand, without this new feed you had to use the AssignmentTimephasedDataSet feed and the EngagementsTimephasedDataSet feed and join the datasets.