Confirming Activities

As a project manager, John wants employees to document their tasks by confirming their working hours and dates. This information provides John with an overview of how the project is progressing, and enables him to identify any inconsistencies early on. For this reason, the following knowledge is required:

• An understanding of how to confirm tasks
• An understanding of how to confirm tasks with the cross-application time sheet (CATS)
• An understanding of how to confirm checklist items

You can use confirmations to document the processing status of project elements and enter the current data for project elements. In Project Management, you can confirm tasks and checklist items. However, you can only enter confirmations if the task or the checklist item has the status Released or In Process.

You can enter the actual start, actual work, actual finish, percentage of completion, and status. You can open tasks, notes, and documents. You can copy planned dates to actual dates.

There are also various alternatives for confirming tasks:

• You can enter the actual data directly in the detail screen of a task.
• You can use the tabular view displayed in the figure.
• You can use the cross-application time sheet (CATS) integration.

To enter the confirmation data directly in the tasks detail screen, choose the Dates and Work tab page. On this tab page, you can enter working hours and the percentage of completion. The remaining work is the difference between the planned work and the actual work. If you select the Remaining work manually checkbox, the system does not calculate the remaining work, and you can enter it directly.

The percentage of completion is independent of the planned work, actual work, or remaining work. Besides work, you also specify the actual start date and the actual finish date.

When you execute a task, you can also set the In Process status. This indicates that the task has begun, but has not yet been finished. The In Process status is set in addition to the Released status. When the task is completed, you can set the Closed status. When the Closed status is set, you can no longer change the confirmed data, however, you can reset the status. The Canceled status is used when a task is terminated. If this status is set as Canceled, you can no longer change the task, and any relationships to other tasks are deleted.

The advantage of using the tabular view is that you can confirm tasks for multiple projects together. You can confirm actual dates and working hours, add documents, and copy planned dates to actual dates.

You can use the cross-application time sheet (CATS) to enter the working time for tasks or project roles from SAP Project Management. If prerequisites are applied, the worklist in the time sheet is filled with the tasks and roles that are assigned to a user or the users for which they are responsible.

Tasks and roles are selected from the worklist and their respective working time is entered. These working times are transferred to SAP Project Management and are available for reporting. These working times are also updated in the account assignment objects in accounting integration. This means the actual costs are updated in the internal order or on the work breakdown structure (WBS) element that is assigned to the project element.

You can also enter confirmations for checklist items. Unlike tasks, you cannot specify the actual work, the remaining work, or the percentage of completion for checklist items.

Confirmation of checklist items document whether an item was completed successfully or not, and the actual finish date of its completion.

The figure Confirming Checklist Items displays the Basic Data and the Dates and Work tab pages for a checklist item. You can enter confirmation data on the Dates and Work tab page.

The prerequisites for entering confirmation data for a checklist item are identical to the prerequisites for a task. The status Released or In Process must be set. If, along with the confirmation data, you want to set the status Finished, all the subordinate tasks for the checklist item must be completed. If you want to finish a checklist item, you can set the status Finished. The prerequisite is that the checklist item has already been confirmed as OK or Not OK.

A checklist item may not be required for the rest of the project. In this case, you can set the status Not Relevant. If all the checklist items of a checklist are Finished or Not Relevant, you can also set the status Finished for the checklist.