Alternative to Task calendar set up and percent allocation issue

B

Bud

Is there an alternative to the following in MS Project......

We manage many small change requests in the schedule plus a person is
contractually obligated to be on-call up to 30 hours for the week but spend
10 hours working on change requests. Accurately Forecasting change request
work is very important as we receive additional revenue for this.

In the on-call weeks for each resource......We have 10 hours a week blocked
off in each persons Resource calendar as this is the time they can spend on
ALL other work other than On-Call. We than have many on-call tasks in the
schedule for every week in the year assigning different resources to that
on-call task and than assign an on-call calendar to those on-call tasks which
we mark as not using the resource calendar.

We than change the resource calendar allocation to represent a 400% look
during those on-call weeks for that resource because MS Project calculates
ALL availability from the Resource calendar. However, it will calculate all
work from anywhere including the on-call calendar weeks. So....we have 40
hours for PersonA comprised of 30 hours of on-call and 10 hours of work we
let MS Project spread to all other tasks in the schedule during those weeks.

It would be impossible to link the on-call task for PersonA with any of the
other tasks in the schedule because many of these tasks are change requests
that we linked together in the clients priority and these change requests get
re-prioritized weekly.

So....we can not link the 8 or so on-call tasks with all the change requests
in the schedule since they would shift anyway when we progress the schedule.
We want MS Project to work around the on-call tasks automatically and the
above set up does that.

However, it is a bit of work to set this up and the on-call changes every
now and than which causes us to go into each resource and reset the 10 work
week plus change the 400% availability to the proper week now that that has
changed.

We also need to show percent allocation at 100% for the 40 hours a week. the
issue is that Percent allocation = availability from the Resource calendar
only vs. ALL Work in that week and this includes what it is getting from the
task calendar on-call task. So...10hrs is what is available and 40 hours is
what is being worked.

We also do not want to manually contour every other task in the schedule for
those resources on call in those on-call weeks. We progress the schedule so
it doesn't work anyway as people work less and more on their other tasks and
the work that was reduced just get moved into other weeks.

Is there another way that we can have MS Project automatically handle this
without having to set a 10 hour day for the resource on those on-call weeks
and than 400% on the on call weeks for each resource since we are using a
task calendar on those on-call tasks ignoring the resource calendar. We
absolutely need to keep the percent allocation at 100% for the 40 hours of
work.

Thanks
 

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