Baselines to Help Tracking of Changes to Project Milestones

abudhwani
Kilo Explorer

‎07-17-2014 11:28 AM

Anyway to create a report off project baselines to determine variances to project schedules? We have project milestones which project managers are updating the planned end for manually and not informing anyone. For us, this is not ideal as limits transparency and accountability for delivering. Plus we cant tell if there is a legit reason for the change and then try to figure out impact to other projects. These milestones don't have any sub-task so there is no roll-up. We had to create a script which runs nightly to capture and communicate changes to milestone dates. See sample below. I can post the code if others are interested.   Any thoughts to limit/stop milestone planned end dates from changing and reporting on changes if they do occur?

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Lisa_Manchester
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

‎07-18-2014 10:59 AM

Hi Arun,


I'm right there with you! Our internal customers want to know when things slip and why...but we have a hard time keeping track of it. Stopping things from slipping at all is the PM holy grail, of course, but even that would start with being able to track it. I would love to have the script you are using. Thanks.


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RyanManning
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

‎07-23-2014 08:42 AM

Arun - Definitely understand the frustration. I think we can all agree that using the word 'Planned End Date' here in the product is confusing and needs to be changed. Manual or system automated changes in ServiceNow shift these dates which causes you to lose track of changes. Emily McMullin (PPM solution expert) and I were talking about this the other day and came to the same solution you did -- adding logic that would snapshot your project (baseline) every time a change was made. I DEFINITELY think this script should go onto Share (share.servicenow.com) Going further, we should have OOTB workflow to accept/reject manual or automated changes to the project plan. As you know, All this can be done with configuration and some customization but we need this OOTB. I can confirm that it is on my Product backlog. Mohan Konyala and Molly Feterl in case they have some suggested implementations of the last comment.


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Molly2
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee
In response to RyanManning

‎07-23-2014 07:57 PM

Hello Arun,


Here are a couple of suggestions for assisting with the tracking of milestone changes.


  • Turn on Auditing for the project task
  • Create a notification for the change of a milestone
  • Require a field or worknotes when milestones change


Turning on "Auditing" for the project task record.  


http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Turning_on_Auditing_%28History%29_for_a_Table



Notification - Also, if you would like to know when milestone changes, you could create a notifications for when the milestone planned end date changes and have the notification sent to you or a group of people.  



Required field - If you would like to have justification for the milestone change, you could require that worknotes or another field (maybe create - Reason for Milestone date change) required when the milestones planned end day changes.



Hope this helps.


Thanks


Molly


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