Best practices projectlink "activity" vs "action item"

[boemi]

Hello community

We are making the first steps with projectlink and I would like

to open the discussion about best practices "activity" vs "action item".

How is your experience?

Regards,
Marc

[adesai]

Activity is applicable to a Project Plan however ActionItem is tied to objects from the Project . Also, Activity can go with many resources or team unlike ActionItem can go with a user at time.

[sm]

I spend a lot time discussing the pros and cons of these two items with FIRST teams all the time.

The Plan is great for a sequenced process that follows a specific order of operations which can be measured in larger blocks of time such as (1-2 weeks). Here are some of the things I really like about the Plan for structured task management.

• Plan items are great for distributing work amongst a larger team when an activity owner is different from the assigned resources.
• Plan items can be direclty associated with Deliverables and work items
• Plan items can have dependencies with each other
• Plan will calculate Critical Path based on relationships
• Plan can be viewed in Gantt chart
• Plan can be executed manually or automatically

When items are measured in smaller blocks of time, not direclty related to each other and simpler in nature, I prefer to use Action Items. Here are some of the things I really like about Action Items for more ad-hoc task management.

• Action Items are not related to each other like Plan activities
• Action Items can have work items directly associated with them, no Deliverables
• Actions Items can be reviewed and edited in Excel
• Action Items do not create resouce assignments to track work

[boemi]

This collection helps a lot!

Now there is another question, perhaps you can answer that.

We are on Winchill 10.1 M040 and if I would like to change an activity to a milestone.

Support told me that this is not possible when a checkbox is active at the start of the project.

If I open the project plan in MS Project I can change an activity to a milestone and then save it back to project link.

Is that a bug or absolutely normal.....

Regards,

Marc

[LindaHeth]

I think the check box you're referring to is the one when you Create a New Activity in EPP

I agree with you. It should be available on an Edit..... if you look at the source on the page, they are using a couple of functions "loadMilestonePicker" and "disableMilestonePicker" I'm betting it "works per spec" and that they never considered that someone might want a One-Day event to be a Milestone.

[LindaHeth]

Another reason we like to use action items is becuse they're GREAT for "open issues" lists, they can be exported to Excel for updating in a Project Meeting and then imported back to Project Link (Mentioned by Scott). They can also be directly associated to an activity, and act as the "details manager" for that activity. I just wish that the status of Action Items could "roll-up" to the Activity Status. I don't understand why the "assignment" exists.

People tend to manage by lists. We did a survey early (2006ish) in our implementation and asked people what their most often used project management tool was... EXCEL topped the list and EMail came in second. It's really hard to convince them that they can do the same thing with Action Items, Activities and Discussions in Projectlink.