You can use Enterprise Custom Fields to create a set of project management standards that can be applied across your organization and to enhance the capabilities of Project Server 2003. You can create Enterprise Custom Fields at the task, project, and resource level. It is important to determine which specific Enterprise Custom Fields your organization needs when you review your business requirements while planning your Project Server 2003 deployment. It is best to do this after you have performed a gap analysis by comparing the capabilities of Project Server 2003 against the business needs of your organization.

For example, a group of executives in an organization wants to be able to view project data by department. To achieve this business requirement, they need to define a consistent method for identifying departments within the organization. In addition, if each department has a different accounting method or funding process, the executives might need to identify a method for defining this, as well.

Similarly, an organization might require custom ways to define the resources within each department. If project managers need to be able to select resources for their projects based on location, then they will need an easy way to identify the location for each resource. Enterprise Resource Outline Codes can be used to help project managers determine availability based on location; however, sometimes additional identifiers are required.

The most important use for Enterprise Custom Fields is to enable organizations to enforce consistency across all projects. For example, if two project managers use different fields to identify a resource's location and apply different Enterprise Resource Outline Codes for each set of resources, then users will be unable to identify when the same resource is assigned to projects managed by each project manager.