How to track changes in project planned end date

[Attila Beregvar]

Dear Community,

I have a requirement to track the number of changes of the Planned End Date field on a project, meaning any time this "end_date" field is updated, a counter should be increased by 1.

I have a custom field (u_changes_in_end_date) to use as a counter, and I created a business rule on the planned_task table, which fires whenever there is a change in the Planned End Date field and increases my counter by 1. 

It works well in case the Planned End Date field on the project is edited directly on the form and I save the changes manually.

However, it looks like the business rule is not triggered when the Planned End Date of a project is not updated directly, but through the Project Tasks structure (like modifying the end date of the latest project task in the hierarchy). If there are tasks under the project, the Planned Start/End Date fields are readonly on the form, and can only be updated by updating the task structure (e.g on the Planning Console).

I've also tried with onChange client script on the pm_project table (Planned End Date changes), but this again only works when I edit the Planned End Date field directly on the form and save it. If the field is readonly, and updated by changing one of the tasks under the project, neither the business rule nor the client script gets executed.

So my question is, how can I track the changes in the project Planned End Date field when it is not directly updated, but as a result of other ootb actions in the background? What can be trigger point and where?

Thanks!

[bammar · Accepted solution]

There are some scripts in Project especially in Script includes that are not audited unfortunately - they literally code in a line or lines that will avoid BR's from running /auditing - I am not sure why 

I do know that depending on how you set things up end dates of Project tasks changing can roll up and change end dates on Project as well and actions like you noticed that really happened are not audited..

I think you should still stay out of box but i wonder what the utility is of what you want 

Another thing you can do---- it isnt a scientific or exact thing but - you can take a scheduled job- snapshot of Project End Date changed- IF it is diff than yesterday make a counter. However you would need another field to hold the previous/current date...

It just depends if it is really worth it to know how many times a project end date changes and how valuable or actionable that data is- 

[Attila Beregvar]

Thanks for the detailed feedback, I had exactly this same idea with the scheduled job, but this should be the very last option as it is not a nice solution.

The business reason behind this requirement is that my client wants to have an overview report on all projects with many information, one of it being the counter to see how many times the planned end date was changed since the original plan was set up (like they apply a template on a fresh project, set up a project plan in form of tasks which results in the "first" planned end date. If this is changed at some point, they would like to see it in a form of the counter so they can report on it.)

[bammar]

The cheap way is check the project when its done- go to auditing table- filter for Planned end date and count how many ( this is the min number of times this happened) . You can advise that its better to stay OOB. trying to change those Calculation and rollup scripts could do more damage than good, but you can say end date is at least x amount of times.

[jhoney101]

Hey Attila, I hope you are doing great. There are a few steps you can take to track changes in a project's planned end date:

• Establish a baseline
• Use a project management tool
• Identify potential risks
• Rebaseline as necessary

Hope this will be helpful.