Frequency of the Progressing Engine Running

Hi -- we ran the progression monthly for about half a year. The one item that we found was that we still needed to run it for all four weeks individually. So running for Jan - Feb still meant 4 or 5 individual week runs.

This also meant that it could not be automated and was a manual task.

Running it for a full month in one go did affect our data. 

Hi @MGMullen -  This is something we explored shortly after we went live.  Our weekly progressing engine cycle was generating a lot if issues and the feeling was these would be less impactful with a cycle in line with our monthly finance processes.  We never progressed beyond testing as we found that a monthly cycle generated similar problems which happened to be much more difficult to troubleshoot given the passing of time.  We did however reconfigure the PE parameters which fixed one issue and focused on a programme of user communication to explain what the PE did, how their activity was impacted and the implications of the PE running if they didn’t tackle certain actions in a specific way (e.g., PMs hitting Run Schedule, resources being suppled to historic periods etc.)

It’s been a hard sell convincing our users that the PE isn’t some kind of evil monster dead set on corrupting their project plans and financials and it’s taken a lot of time to gain user confidence in the PE process, but we’ve stuck with the weekly process and have seem some significant improvement over time.  However I do think there are more things that can be done from a system perspective (automation & constraints) to take the emphasis away from users doing the right thing at the right time only to have issues exposed when the PE finally runs

I was wishing it could happen daily, so that only small changes would happen each day, but I realize it would be hard on system resources. The main thing we get questions on is why the Schedule Start for work lines in progress is always the same day and they didn’t put it that way! We’ve made lots of educational materials, too. Lots.

@sunasak - We actually do run it each day Mon-Fri and don’t have much of an issue on system resources.  We do this to 1) catch any timesheets that were not submitted/approved on time and 2) we have situations where we may need to move effort from one project to another due to budgetary reasons and we cannot see the final application of that move until progression runs. 

Thanks, @pamela.sargent - I’ll mention that to my team.