Last week while training at a client site I was asked if a Project Manager can change who approves certain tasks in their projects from themselves to another Project Manager. The Project Manager would remain unchanged but certain tasks would be redirected to a different Project Manager’s approval page. My response was of course! Just have the Project Manager who will be managing those selected tasks open the project in Project Pro, insert the Status Manager field into the view and create a new task. They will become by default the Status Manager of the new task and once this occurs you can change the Status Manager for existing tasks in the plan to this new manager.
Well, the challenge for this organization was that these Project Managers will not have the client installed. I began to explain that the only place to change the Status Manager field was in Project Pro because it was not an available field in PWA. I then opened the Tasks Summary field in Server Settings to demonstrate the limitation and much to my surprise, there it was! Of course I was very excited about this discovery and my audience thought I had finally gone mad after four days of training.
I added it to the Tasks Summary view, had another Project Manager open my project in the web and create a new task. They were then able to change the Status Manager to themselves directly in the web without opening the project in Pro. Awesome! Project Managers that only manage a phase or group of tasks within a project owned by someone else can do so without needing a Project Professional license. The task updates submitted via Timesheets or the Tasks page will come to them for approval.
Thank you Microsoft!
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