How do you close down a phase?

Tony Platts

I'm closing down all the phases within my projects over the weekend. There seems to be two mechanisms for this;

1. Delete the phase.
2. Set the end date of the phase to Saturday.

Here's the issues.

If you delete the phase, any time reported on this phase also dissapear. This is not an option for us. If you set the end date in the past, you can still enter time on the phase. Essentially nothing happens.

On that basis, I have two questions.

1. What is the purpose of the end date on a phase? It seems pointless.
2. How do I stop people entering time into the phases.

Brian_Richardson

There's very little point to project or phase end dates. When you do an "Underlying Data" export from a report you'll get info on whether the hours were part of a phase, but not what the phase dates were. End dating a resource will remove their post-dated allocations from Analytics reports but won't remove the allocation itself. This doesn't happen with end dating projects/phases though…the allocations are still reported as Time and Fees.

Also it doesn't change the timesheets… post-phase-end dated tasks are still in timecards waiting to be confirmed.

Frankly, you cannot stop people from entering time into phases. Until you archive the project, it's available including phases.

Tony Platts

It all feels very badly done but also very inconsistent.

• End dating a phase has absolutely no affect.
• Setting the time budget to "Specify one time budget for the entire project" instead of "Specify a time budget for each phase" has absolutely no affect.
• Deleting the categories in the phases you no longer want to use has absolutely no affect.
• Having done all of this, I can still happily go into my timesheet and add time to a closed phase and see all the categories I once had.

The inconsistent part is that the only way to stop the phase showing in future timesheets is to delete the phase in the project but that removes all the historic data.

And I wouldn't be doing any of this if the integration between Smartsheet and Resource Management respected phases in the first place, or Resource Management had any concept of billable v non-billable like any other timesheeting system.

Sorry, I'm really frustrated by the limitations of Smartsheet today. I'm trying to do a cutover and every single step is a hurdle.

Brian_Richardson

It’s ok- tool limitations get frustrating. I agree there’s some improvements needed. My particular annoyance is that every synced task shows up in the schedule. When people have a couple hundred tasks it gets pretty bad to view.

One suggestion- use the Product Ideas section of Community to post enhancement ideas. They can get voted on and product mgmt does actually watch the board. I know a lot of companies say that but I know a couple of SS product mgrs and they have told me they do take a hard look at what comes in there.

Tony Platts

I've been making a lot of use of the Submit Feedback option but maybe that's a better idea. I agree, it gets very hard to review tasks when you've got 5 or 6 in any given day. I think it's even worse when you've got a few tasks at 25% allocation that run for a few days then a couple that are an hour long. It just doesn't seem designed for that at all.