Agile 9.3.4 PPM Global Calendaring Issues
We are planning to upgrade to Agile 9.3.4 but facing some road blocks and Agile PLM PPM limitations/bugs. I would like to hear from the group what’s their experience so far…
The A934 version was supposed to resolve the calendaring issue across the globe. The International Calendaring feature is not helping us leverage the multiple calendar option in the PPM projects.
Following are the issues discovered so far.
1. Currently we are on Agile 9.3.3 and using 7 days calendaring. When we do an upgrade from 933 to 934, the task & project dates are not automatically shifted to 5 days Default calendar. Hence all the dates are on 7 days calendar unless we make some changes (on any field update, not necessarily the dates) in the task for the dates to be adjusted. Thus for the existing Project Templates, projects, phases and thousands of tasks in our Production environment, we need to figure out how we change the Dates for it to reflect correct 5 days week calendaring as a default.
2. Task Creation: The Default calendar for the new Tasks (Project, Program, Phase and Gates) is loaded based on the creators preferred calendar. If we then change the owner to another user with a different preferred calendar the task dates are not changed.
We discovered that the user’s preferred calendar (Activity Owner) is overridden by the Tasks Calendar value.
3. All the activities and gates must use the same calendar in templates. This essentially makes the multi-calendaring feature useless.
4. Trying to move the schedule is prohibited if the affected activities and its children are not on the same calendar.
I wonder if you have overcome this issue. Have you contacted support and received help? Can you share with us where you are at on this please?
Regarding 3 and 4, we are working on 2 patches that will fix the behavior you describe. Please file a SR and ask for HF 9.3.4.0.1 to enable Move Schedule (will also allow Templates to have multiple calendars and dependencies to be created between tasks with different calendars). If wanted, please also ask for HF 9.3.4.0.3 to enable editing the calendar of parent activities. The second issue is mostly cosmetic since dates are rolled up, but we do understand that most customers will want to see the Activity in a similar calendar to its children.
For #1, rescheduling can be triggered by several different methods, but does require the App Server to be running. The database upgrade cannot recalculate schedules because that logic is in the App Server, which means the database upgrade utility (AUT) cannot change the dates.
For #2, per all our documentation, the Task calendar controls the schedule. Customers can have Activity Owners and Team Resources with any number of different preferred calendars. In many customers, the Activity Owner, or Project Manager, is not actually the resource working on a Task. The project manager and resource may be in different regions. We chose to enable the most flexibility by allowing the Project Manager to choose the Task Calendar independently from any user Preferred Calendar.
One manual option you can try is to open the Default Calendar, check Saturday, Save, then un-check Saturday and save. When you go to any project, you will see a message “At least one activity in your project will be rescheduled due to a Calendar update. …” Now select Actions > Accept Calendar Change. This should reschedule your entire project. I do understand this is not automated