Understanding Activities

Use any of these methods to create new activities:

• Add an activity on the Activity Definitions - General Information page and enter the required information.

• Add an activity to a project on the Project Activities page.

  Activities created on the Project Activities page are merely placeholders with activity IDs and high-level descriptions sufficient to add transactions. Use the Activity Definitions - General Information page, and other pages in the Project Activity component (PROJECT_ACTIVITY), to create and further define these activities.

• Use activities on a predefined project template (see Create Project From Template Page) or copy an existing project and activities (seeCopy Project Page).

• Create project activities from other PeopleSoft applications such as PeopleSoft Proposal Management (see Preparing and Generating Proposal Information) or PeopleSoft Contracts (see Assigning Projects and Activities to Contracts).

• Create project activities from Microsoft Project tasks (see Understanding Integration of PeopleSoft Project Costing with Microsoft Project.

• Upload activities from third-party applications by using the Project and Activity Loader Application Engine process (PC_INTF_GEN) using the Load Projects and Activities Page (see alsoUnderstanding Third-Party Data Integration).

• Upload activities from Microsoft Excel by using the Excel to Component Interface utility.

  See PeopleTools: PeopleSoft Component Interfaces, "Using the Excel to Component Interface Utility."

You can assign owners to detail and summary activities. The owner is primarily used for workflow approval at the activity level if you use PeopleSoft Program Management. They can be used for issues workflow or as interested parties.

You can search for activities by activity owner. In the Activity General component (PROJECT_ACTIVITY) search page, you only need to enter a business unit and any employee to view a list of activities that are owned by the employee.

Use the Activity Definitions - General Information page or the Project Activities page - Details tab to add activity owners. Any project team member is eligible to be selected as an activity owner. You cannot delete a project team member that is assigned as an activity owner.

If you modify or remove an activity owner for a summary activity, you have the option of making the change to all child activities of that summary activity.

Summary activities are used to group other activities for reporting and accounting purposes.

If you use PeopleSoft Project Costing without PeopleSoft Program Management, you cannot charge transactions directly to summary activities.

You can change detail activities into summary activities and move activities to different work breakdown structure (WBS) levels if no team members or transactions are associated with the activity in these tables:

• Project Transactions Summary (PC_ACTIVITY_SUM)

• Project Transaction Interface (INTFC_PROJ_RES)

• Project Activity Team Member (PROJ_ACT_TEAM )

• Project Costing Assets (PC_AM_PROJ_DEFN)

• Contract Line Project Details (CA_DETAIL_PROJ)

• Forecast Time Detail (FC_TIME_DTL)

If you use PeopleSoft Program Management, you can charge transactions and budgets to summary activities and to forecast summary activities based on the project charging level.