Name: Leveraging Cobra’s Utilities to Maintain Projects Through System-Level Changes
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T19:31:09.032Z
Duration: 25 min 56 s
Description: Leveraging Cobra’s Utilities to Maintain Projects Through System-Level Changes

Transcript for "Leveraging Cobra’s Utilities to Maintain Projects Through System-Level Changes": Hello, everyone. My name is Mary Major, and I'm a senior principal solutions engineer at Deltek. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation. But before I get started, I have a few administrative items to note. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome. If you have a question, please type it into the q and a box anytime during the presentation. We will address as many questions as we can at the conclusion of the webinar, and any questions left unanswered will be addressed individually offline following today's presentation. Resources including the presentation slides are available for you to download in the resources tab on your screen. You will also receive the on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. So today's topic topic is leveraging COBRA's utilities to maintain projects throughout through system level changes. And in particular, the items I'm going to talk about are align time phased dates, updating codes, replace resources, zero out data, and then we should have plenty of time for q and a. But before I jump into the demonstration, there are a few additional slides that I'm not going to go through, that contain some of the information that I'm gonna demonstrate today. But you may wanna download them for your future reference, and you can get those from the resources tab. But I do wanna show this next slide because the first item I'm going to demonstrate is the align time phased dates functionality. So I'm not gonna worry about what's on the right here. I'll be talking about that in the demonstration. But for whatever reason, your company has decided to change their month end dates, in particular, for, you know, starting in, April 2026, instead of ending on the last day of the month, for months other than quarter ends, they're gonna end on the last Friday of the month. And they're doing this to, to make payroll processing easier. They won't have to deal with as many accruals. So with that, I'm gonna jump into COBRA, and we'll be able to see how this process works. K. So here I am in in a COBRA project, and we want to update the calendars. So currently on this project, I have this this is my calendar. And if we look at the period dates, we see if I go down, into 2026 in particular, the last days of the the last date of the month is my period end date. And I want to change that based on that Excel file that we saw a few minutes ago. So I already created a a new calendar file, very simply by making by doing the save as from this one. And then I've made changes in Excel to those dates, and then I'm gonna import that back in. So I could go in here and manually insert new dates, delete old dates. That can be a little cumbersome. It's usually easier to just import that file in. So to do that, we'll go to integration and ancillary files. And I saved my configuration. And this is the file. Now it's important if you've when doing this particular, process where you're you want to replace calendar dates, it's important to use the overwrite option versus the update. The update would just add new dates. So then you'd have, two dates, for example, April 2026, two dates for in May 2026. So you wanna make sure you use the overwrite option. And and, you know, and just to show what that looks like, you know, this is just going through each of those columns. Another benefit of doing it this way, if you create the new calendar first and then run the export co export calendars report, it's gonna be in this exact format, which is the exact format that, this integration import will recognize all of those column headers. And I am just gonna hit finish. I'll go ahead and save it. I don't think I made any changes, and it imported that in. So now I'm going to go look at my new calendar, in particular, some of, from April 2026 and on. And I know my dates were the last day of the month. So now I do see updated dates for April, May. July 31 happened to be a Friday, August, you know, and so on for rest of the year. So if your hours changed, you may want to recalculate your hours. Now in in this process, the it's not going to, when we actually run the aligned time phase dates. It's not going to respread anything or change anything. But if you go to add new resource assignments, particularly for a forecast, you'll wanna make sure you have the right hours per month for each month. So I'm going to just hit my calculate hours. And if I scroll back down here, we see those changed. In fact, if we if we look at I don't I think this was a 176, and now it's 200 because it added nearly a week. So now the calendar is updated. I'm going to save that so it gets that change of those, updated hours. And then back over on my COBRA project, you need to go to properties in the files tab and change to the new calendar. So you need to do that first before we run the process. So I'm going to pick my new calendar and just say okay to save that change. Then we go over to tools and go to the align time phase dates. I always verify my project. Actually, in in fact, you really should make a backup before you do this. Before any of these processes, it's always a good idea to run a backup of your COBRA project just in case you run into any problems. So now it has my new calendar. I just have to tell it what my old calendar was. And I pick that and hit finish. It's it's that simple. Now on this one, the log is very informative. It shows you exactly which dates changed. So we're only seeing the ones that changed. And then down below, it tells you what time phased records the date was changed. And we we see here I'm gonna highlight this first one. All it did was change that date. It didn't change the spreading. It didn't change how it's distributed across months. It just changed that date. So you might have circumstances where your your budget's been, approved, and you don't want to change the spread at all. Other times when you do wanna respread it, you can do that as well. But this process will just change the dates without respreading anything. And let me close that. The the other probably another good reason to create your new calendar from, as a copy of your old one so that it has the same number of periods. The process will not run if you have different number of periods. So if in the old calendar, you started in 2024 and ran through 2027, And the new one, maybe you start in 2024, but it goes through 2028, it will not let you run because it's trying to do a side by side comparison. The next process is update codes. And let me go up here to my views. Oops. I saved a a view so I didn't have to go pick a bunch of different columns to look at. So in this case, we have a new CAM. Schmidt has been assigned to a different program. He's not gonna be working this project any longer. So I need to to switch my CAM from from Schmidt to to Jose Carlos. Now I could go in here and just change everywhere I have Schmidt to Carlos. No big deal. But if you have a very large program where you may have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of control accounts, that could be, you know, time consuming to go through and make some of those types of changes. So we can use the update codes tool, and you have lots of criteria options. So based on what you select, you'll get different options on on the next screen. So if, if I pick CAM, I can tell it which CAM I want to change, and I'm gonna change Schmidt. Now, you may have noticed my new CAM, Carlos, is already in the file. So you'll have to make sure that what you're changing to already exists in your code files. And then what am I gonna update it to? And I'm gonna pick Carlos. Now if I picked, and actually, before I make this change, let's just show another, another option. If I were to pick, like, a, you know, maybe I had you know, I wanted to to find a particular control account. You know, I could select that control account and then select the OBS and make that change. And then and then and then at that point, actually, let me just go ahead and pick something here. Trades exterior doors. Then on the next screen, I have the ability to change then any of the control account or work package codes that are associated with that control account. So, again, large programs makes it very easy to do these types of changes rather than navigating through, to identify them or locate them and then make the changes. So here, I'm gonna make that Carlos. I'm gonna move this over so that when I hit finish, we see that that all of those changed. Pretty easy. The next one, this is probably my favorite one in this group that I'm gonna talk about today, is the replace resources. So this one used to be it was an all or nothing. You could pick your project. In fact, let me go ahead and and open it up. You had the screen, and you could pick a single resource. And in fact, let me cancel this and expand it so I can actually see my resources. There we go. Civil engineering. So before, it was kind of an all or nothing. It would apply to all classes, all periods, the entire project. Now we have the ability to limit where we apply it. So in this scenario, this this project was set up with generic resources, civil engineering, electrical engineering. And now that we're ready to execute, we have names to assign to these to the project. So in this case, I am going to find my civil engineer, and I'm gonna play replace it with DeLuca. Now I could navigate to DeLuca, you know, through the the resource structure, or I could just type it in. You also have the option to use a file. So if you have more than one resource to replace, you could attach a file. And the file is very simply two columns, old resource, new resource. And and the slides that are attached, you can download those, and it has an example of what one of those files would look like. But I am going to change civil with DeLuca. I have options. Do I want to apply this change to completed, in progress, and let's recalculate afterwards? I'm going to leave the completed unchecked because they're done. We don't really care about those so much. And then here's where I would have the option if I wanted to to apply it to a specific control account, you know, any of these elements, a WBS, which would include WBS leg, or selections based on a control account or work package level codes. And I can pick which classes. I could click that top box to select all of them. I'm just gonna keep it simple in this case because I do have some actuals that have accrued for for several resources. I don't wanna change those, and some of them are the generic civil engineering. So I'm just gonna change my budget and my forecast, and then it does give me an option for a date range. But I'm just gonna leave it at at all. I've already limited it to in progress. By default, it will always do planned. My log is on, so I could type in a comment. Change generic resources to named resources. So now if I go run my project audit log, that comment, and a log number will show up. Even though it'll be a a $0 change, it will it will show up accordingly. And if I go and expand these again, we see it changed the ones that were planned or in progress, ones that were completed, like this one and this one. It left those alone. So a great utility to be able to make changes to your resources. Or maybe you, you know, accidentally use the wrong resource. Now, of course, you you know, if you, you have the option to recalculate or not. If you picked a different something with a different rate, you might wanna go recalc it afterwards, for sure. And the last one is zero out data. Oops. Let me let me change my view first. Here we go. So in this case, I am going to my accruals that were entered in in in August were incorrect rather than go in one by one and manually fix them. And and accruals can sometimes be complex because you'll you'll have pluses and minuses. I've decided just to go ahead and clear them out and then reload my new correct file. So, again, using the zero out data under tools, and and move this over a little bit so we can see that when when the change happens. You have some options here. Am I do you want to in this case, I'm gonna leave this top option. I wanna zero out data. So I want to change data that has values other than zero to zero, and then I want to delete those once it changes them to zero. They'll still display on the screen as zeros. But behind the scenes in the the time phase table, selecting this delete deletes those rows from the time phase table. So it it it, in essence, kind of can be some some cleanup and maintenance and deletes unnecessary rows of data. And then there's also a secondary option to just go in and delete existing zeros that may already exist. You don't have to necessarily change anything from a value to zero. You just wanna delete zeros that are already there. And, we have options for completed in progress, and I'll go ahead and update my totals. And we have the same criteria, option screen with various options we can select from. I'm just gonna leave it a total project. I can pick my class. Accruals is the class I'm interested in changing. And, again, time periods. In this case, I don't wanna do all. I wanna do one specific period. So I'm gonna do from and to that exact same period. Then next and then finish. And voila, everything went to zero. So with that, I'm going to jump over to q and a. So at this time, we are gonna conduct a quick audience poll and then open the floor to questions. If you haven't already submitted a question, please enter it into the q and a tab now. Okay. We're going to before we dive into q and a, we're going to pause for a moment and have everyone answer our polling question for today. I'm So gonna go ahead and open our poll and share with everyone. Would you like to be contacted by a sales representative to see how Deltek PPM can help you achieve improved levels of project success. I'll just give everybody a moment here to answer the question. Just give it another second here. Okay. I think at this time we can take the first question. So Mary, you wanna go ahead with the first question? Okay. I have a few questions here. Can these the first question. Can these any of these tools be used with COBRA's API batch process? And, yes, a few of them can. The zero out data or replace resources can both be used with COBRA's, API batch, which means that if you have, you know, wholesale resource changes, as an example, where you've completely changed your resource structure, you could do that in the batch process, and it would go through project by project and make those changes. Another question. Can you use the update codes on a master project? Yes. You can. In COBRA, you can run that process on a master project. So if you have a large program, for example, that maybe has four or five individual subprojects in it, you could run that process at that master project level, and it would go through and make all of those changes. So in our example today, it would go through each of those individual subprojects and update the CAM. Another question. Can you limit who has access to these tools? Absolutely. The security model that sits in, on top of COBRA, you can limit by role, which roles have access to these tools, or at an individual level. And it looks like those are all of the questions that we have today. Thank you all. Okay, great. Thanks, Mary. Really good presentation. Before we officially conclude, we want to remind you, you will receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours. And if we're not able to get to your question, we will be sure to follow-up with you directly offline. And with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. Please visit deldtech.com for more upcoming Deltek events. Have a great rest of your day.