Resource Management

Hello,

My name is Dave Ducolon and I am a Program Manager for Microsoft Office Project/Project Server. It is my pleasure to write about and to discuss Resource Management and other related topics for the 2007 release.

Resource Management is at its best a hard job. And at the core is Capacity Management and Planning. As most of you know, the trouble is that while people or “work resources” are not a commodity such as bricks or lumber, neither are they fixed assets (ones with unlimited capacity). And if that doesn’t make Resource Management difficult enough, work resources can be augmented with external resources such as consultants or subcontractors. We on the Project team at Microsoft not only understand this challenge we experience it the same as anybody else that does project based work.

In 2007 we have taken significant steps to help mitigate the inherant difficulties of managing resources whether they are People, Material or even costs. Today I will give you an overview of how we see the Project 2007 system being used to accomplish this. This is a brief, yes very brief overview of some of the Resource Management features that will help you manage your resources end-to-end. In later posts, I will dive deeper into features.

To begin with, it is best to model organizational capacity and then to work on tactical level assignments. Generic resources, a legacy feature, are ideal to represent your organizational capacity as it pertains to resource capabilities. Then as work gets approved you can allocate these generic resources to a new 2007 feature in Project Server 2007 called Resource Plans.

Resource Plans allow you to manage resource needs for a project without requiring any task level detail. Then as the project and work become better defined you will be able to convert these Generic Resource Plan assignments into Resource Plan assignments for real employees. At which time you will undoubtedly need to view availability and verify that individuals do not get over scheduled.

Resource Leveling, a legacy feature, can be used to automate the task of managing allocations of work to individuals or you may want to make use of the Resource Availability graph, a legacy feature, in Project Server. Regardless of which method you choose, you will undoubtedly move on into the execution phase.

For this phase Project Server 2007 delivers functionality that allows customers to separate the effort spent on a project and its tasks from the actual work performed. Effort is normally what team members think of when they are reporting their progress on a task. It is not uncommon to hear people say “I am 60% complete and should finish by Friday”. This does not mean that they will use every available minute between the statement and Friday to complete the work and it also does not mean that they spent exactly 60% of the scheduled work for that task. Instead it means they have spent 60% of the effort they feel is needed on the task and that the other 40% should be able to be accomplished by Friday. Team Member Task tracking in Project Server has been able to capture that information since we first released Project Server back in 2000. In 2007 we have delivered a separate timesheet that allows team members to report their actual hours worked whether that be on a Project or on a specific Task.

It is through use of these features that you will be able to more accurately plan, estimate, track and manage your resources time and thereby improve your ability to manage resources. In my next Post, I will present and review the Resoruce Plan feature.