MSP New Driver: Tasks change from Fixed Work to Fixed Units when exporting from Clarity

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

• When upgrading from the Clarity Microsoft Project (MSP) Legacy driver to the MSP New Driver, all of the tasks which were set as fixed work are converted to fixed units instead.
• Additional side effect of fixed work tasks coming over as fixed units:
  • Actual duration is always zero after the upgrade when before, it was based on the number of actual days the task was worked on.
  • Note the day the task was worked on ARE preserved in the task usage screen just the actual duration in days is now always zero.

Environment

Release: All Supported Releases
Component: PPMMSP

MSP New Driver, upgrading from the MSP Legacy Driver

Cause

In Clarity versions 15.5 and lower, this is working as expected. 

Resolution

In 15.5 and higher:

• There has been an enhancement added around fixed work behavior, details on this found at: CA PPM MSP Upgrades From the Legacy Interface to the New XML Driver.
• An excerpt from the documentation on the enhancements included is listed below:

CA PPM 15.5 MSP integration resolves this situation by providing the following new functionality:

• A new Task Type single-select lookup attribute that allows CA PPM to store any of the 3 MSP task type options. The new Task Type attribute is also available for reads and writes (updates) through the XML Open Gateway (XOG).
• A new MSP integration update to leverage this new Task Type lookup and store/retrieve that information when importing/exporting, including the initial generation of tasks from template.
• A new upgrade script that will interrogate projects that have existing MPP files attached using the old adapter and initially populate the new Task Type field with the appropriate details. The upgrade script should only have to be run once following the upgrade to the new version for customers that are upgrading from an older version with legacy MSP adapter support.

In versions prior to 15.5:

This was reviewed as CLRT-78497 and determined to be working as expected in versions of PPM earlier than 15.5 with the new driver.

Workaround: The workaround in versions prior to 15.5 would be to manually change the task type in MSP and save back to PPM. 

 A tip to help save time in updating the task types here a project manager has a lot of tasks that need to be changed: 

1. In Microsoft Excel, Type 'Fixed Work' in a cell 
2. With your mouse, click the bottom right hand corner of the cell, and drag the + icon down in the column for as many rows as tasks in the project (IE 1,500, if the project has 1,500 tasks) 
3. Highlight the entire column and press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to copy the entire column 
4. Navigate to the project in MSP 
5. Add the 'Type' column if it's not there already 
6. Click on the 'Type' column header to highlight the entire column 
7. Press Ctrl+V on your keyboard to paste the contents from excel to the Type column in MSP 
This should populate all tasks as Fixed Work (aside from summary tasks which are set as Fixed Duration) 
8. Check any dates that may need to be adjusted based on the task type 
9. Save the project back to Clarity

Additional Information

Reference KB000071385 - Clarity and MSP integration - List of Knowledge Documents
Reference KB000015956 - Clarity and MSP integration known defects - Support Technical Document Index