Updating the Status Manager, the sleight of hand

The status manager is the resource who is to receive status updates for a task, from any resource assigned to this task. The Status Manager (task field) is described in this page from Microsoft support.

Known limitation

Microsoft Project has a limitation that prevents a schedule owner from setting a task’s status manager to anyone except himself or herself. Hence, if you want to assign another person as the Status Manager to a task within your project plan, you need to ask him/her to edit the schedule in Microsoft Project and assign himself or herself as the Status Manager.

The sleight of hand

In my current company, I am in charge of the scheduling preparation for several project, hence I use a lot the delegation feature. For more information about delegation, you can read this mpug.com article, Using theProject Server Delegation Feature Written on January 7, 2014 by Jessica Carlisle.

What I found is that when creating a new task acting as a delegate, the Status Manager for this new task is the resource you are working on behalf. In addition, reading again the definition of the Status Manager on the Microsoft support page, I found this: “The status manager can be changed to any other status manager in this enterprise project.”

The solution is found J, you create a fake task using delegation for each Project Manager you want to assign as a Status Manager, then when you open the project in Microsoft Project Pro, you can update the Status Manager to any of those resources.

In detail

To ease the management of Status manager, I have created a Project view in Project Server/Project online. Here is my simple project schedule.

By default, I am the Status Manager for all task. I cannot edit this field in Project Server/Project Online, so I will open it using Microsoft Project Pro.

In Microsoft Project Pro, the list of resources for the Status manager only contains my name.

What I want to do, is to update the Status Manager for all tasks related to Plumbing (Sub-Topic = Plumbing) to resource PPM User1.

Back to Project Server/Project Online, by using delegation, working on behalf of PPM User1, I add a fake task to the schedule. Of course, the PPM User1 should be granted edit rights to this specific project.

For the task inserted using the delegation, the Status Manager is set to PPM User1. I save, publish and check in.

Back to Microsoft Project Pro, the magic happens; I can edit the Plumbing tasks and set their Status Manager to PPM User1. When finished, I can delete the fake task created.