Standard and custom fields are provided by default for data related to tasks, resources, and projects. Enterprise Outline Codes provide a set of customizable fields that you can use to represent your organization’s unique project data requirements. These fields provide a mechanism for defining hierarchical data values that can be assigned by means of a drop-down list to individual tasks, resources, or projects. The Enterprise Global Template includes 90 Enterprise Outline Codes, 30 each for tasks, resources, and projects. Some of these codes are reserved for special purposes, and all are critical to the following two aspects of project management:

• Resource assignment
• Reporting

Enterprise Resource Outline Codes and Resource Assignment

The Enterprise Resource Pool enables you to assign resources from throughout the entire organization to project tasks. Enterprise Resource Outline Codes provide you with information about resources in the Enterprise Resource Pool, including skills, location, and other essential characteristics, which helps you to identify the best resource to assign to specific tasks.

Enterprise Resource Outline Codes are used by the Build Team from Enterprise feature in Project Professional and the Build Team feature in Project Web Access in the following ways:

• For resource matching, including matching generic resources to actual resources.
• In custom filters, to help filter resources that are relevant to the assignment.
• In Project Professional, to group resources for ease of selection.

Enterprise Resource Outline Codes greatly simplify the process of determining the appropriate resource to assign to a task. When you use Enterprise Resource Outline Codes, you can match generic resources to actual resources when you are using the Build Team feature in both Project Professional and Project Web Access to assign resources to a project team.

Enterprise Outline Codes and Build Team in Project Web Access

The Build Team feature in Project Web Access enables project managers and resource managers to add resources to a project team.

When you open Build Team, the right pane shows the resources that are available in the project, and the left pane shows Filtered Enterprise Resources. The left pane is initially empty. Loading the entire Enterprise Resource Pool into Project Web Access can be time-consuming, so resources are only loaded into the left pane after a filter has been applied.

When you expand the Filter Enterprise Resources option, a grid appears that you can use to define a custom resource filter based on the Enterprise Resource Outline Codes. After you enter criteria related to Enterprise Resource Outline Codes into the filter definition grid, you can apply the filter, and then the filtered resources will appear in the left pane.

Enterprise Outline Codes and Custom Filters

Although resource matching is a powerful technique for identifying appropriate resources, it is limited in that it is based on a single set of criteria (and whether that set of criteria is based on one or more Enterprise Resource Outline Codes). Project and resource managers often need to base their resource assignments on multiple sets of criteria. Custom filters enable you to define unique requirements when you build a team by using resources in the Enterprise Resource Pool. Unlike the functionality provided by resource matching, a custom filter can be based on more than one criterion that are logically connected by AND or OR operators. You can develop custom filters as needed, work with predefined custom filters, and save custom filters for future use.

The Build Team feature initially loads all resources into the left pane with no filters applied unless the Enterprise Resource Pool contains more than 1,000 resources. If the Enterprise Resource Pool includes more than 1,000 resources, the Prefilter Enterprise Resources dialog box opens.

The Prefilter Enterprise Resources dialog box.

You can use the Prefilter Enterprise Resources dialog box to filter the number of resources that are available from the Enterprise Resource Pool. The Prefilter Enterprise Resources dialog box enables you to use Enterprise Outline Codes, including RBS, to filter for the resources that will appear in the left pane of the Build Team dialog box. Use the Count button to determine the number of users that remain based on the filters that you have applied.

Enterprise Outline Codes and Group By

The Group by drop-down list in the Build Team dialog box is a powerful feature that you can use to identify appropriate resources for tasks. The Group by feature enables you to display available resources grouped by any data field that is available in the Group by drop-down list, including organization-specific data that is defined in Enterprise Resource Outline Codes.

Enterprise Outline Codes and Reporting

Views in Project Professional and Project Web Access provide sophisticated and flexible reporting options for Project users. You can use Enterprise Outline Codes to define specific filtering, reporting, grouping, and sorting information in your organization for the following types of views:

• Project Center Views
• Project Views
• Resource Center Views
• Assignment Views
• Portfolio Analyzer Views

Project Center Views

Project Center views provide summary-level information about projects. You can use Enterprise Project Outline Codes to filter, group, sorting, and define Project Center views.

 Note   Enterprise Project Outline Codes might not show up in the lists for default views. Use the Manage views section on the Admin page to add Enterprise Project Outline Codes to views.

Project Views

Project views provide information about the tasks in a project, including Enterprise Task Outline Codes in the Project View definition. You can view, group, filter, and sort information in Project views based on the information defined in the Enterprise Task Outline Codes.

 Note   Enterprise Task Outline Codes might not show up in the lists for default views. Use the Manage views section on the Admin page to add Enterprise Task Outline Codes to views.

Resource Center Views

Resource Center views provide information about your organization’s resources. The Resource Center enables resource managers and executives to view resource availability and commitments. You can use Enterprise Resource Outline Codes to filter, group, and sort views in the Resource Center by location, department, skills, or other information that is stored in Enterprise Resource Outline Code fields.

 Note   Enterprise Resource Outline Codes might not show up in lists for default views. Use the Manage views section on the Admin page to add Enterprise Resource Outline Codes to views.

Assignment Views

Assignment views provide information about the assignments that resources in the organization are working on. Assignment views are different from other views in Project Web Access and Project Professional. Assignment views show the assignment information that is published to Project Server 2003 from Project Professional. The Resource Center enables resource managers and executives to look at the status of the individual tasks on which a resource is working. You can use Enterprise Task Outline Codes to filter, group, and sort Assignment views. You might need to customize the published fields to view Enterprise Task Outline Codes in the Assignments views.

 Note   Enterprise Task Outline Codes might not show up in lists for default views. Use the Manage views section on the Admin page to add Enterprise Task Outline Codes to views.

Portfolio Analyzer Views

Portfolio Analyzer views provide for flexibility in data analysis. The Enterprise Outline Codes that you define determine the dimensions (hours, days, and so on) that are available in Portfolio Analyzer. These Enterprise Outline Codes enable you to analyze workload by skill, location, department, project, and more.

 Note   Task information is not stored in the Analysis Services database by default during the creation of an online analytical processing (OLAP) cube. Therefore, task information is not available by default in Portfolio Analyzer views. Task information can be of significant volume, and many organizations will not find much value in including task-level data in Portfolio Analyzer views. If your organization wants to provide task data in Portfolio Analyzer, you can extend the OLAP cube to include task data and other custom data that is relevant to your organization.

In addition to reporting data in Enterprise Outline Codes, views can be used to filter, group, or search for data values, including data in Enterprise Outline Codes. You can control views by using the Filter, Group, Search options at the top of every view in Project Web Access (other than Portfolio Analyzer). Portfolio Analyzer provides a much more sophisticated dynamic interface by means of the PivotChart and PivotTable features. By using these features, you can interact with the data and look into more specific dimensions of data based on structures that are defined by Enterprise Outline Codes.