Best Practice for functional managers to help in resourcing

[Kate]

Hello,

Our company is relatively new to using MS Project (we're on 2003 Enterprise
and are just starting to try to use Project Web Access more efficiently).
We're a small company (30 people total) with tech, creative, user experience,
and analytics departments that need visibility as to what their resources are
currently working on as well as what projects are in the pipeline that may
need to be resourced.

I am currently using a set of generic resources set up in our enterprise
resource pool to provide initial project timelines and cost estimates for
those projects in the pipeline.

I had found the View Resource Assignments reports in PWA and set up saved
reports for each department with their specific resources so that we could
see current assignment.

I also wanted to have the proposed projects with the generic resources
assigned show up in these reports so that we could look at what possible
resources might need to be assigned at any point in time if a project starts
when proposed.

It's very strange - I successfully published (Collaborate - publish all
information) one of these proposed projects and could see the generic
resource assignments in my PWA report. But then I tried with several other
proposed projects, but they will not show up in those reports!!! It's driving
me crazy. I did a test and replaced all generic resources with our real
resources and the task assignment info showed up in View Resource
Assignments. Then when I put the generic resources back in and republished,
that project and all its tasks/assignments disappeared from the report.

I'm looking for one of two things:
- the reason why I can't see these generic resource assignments in PWA's
View Resource Assignments reports and how to fix that issue.
OR
- The right way to allow our Traffic Manager, me (the project supervisor)
and functional managers to track what people in the company are working on
AND what proposed projects are going to need resourcing.

Hope someone has one or both answers!
Thanks,
Kate

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

A suggestion for your first issue. What is the harm in using generic
resources but making them real resources. This will allow you to see the
assignments on proposed projects. The only difference with generic generic
and real generic is not having the ablity to do a replace on generic (which
is not that great of a feature anyways) and the fact that it will create
user accounts for these real generics (Project Server Authenticated). You
can just make sure they are not in any security group by removing them form
the Team Members group.

Jonathan

 

[/pd]

Kate

1) Enable the resource Enterprise pool to sync in with AD forest. All
resources are actually resources
2) When assigning resources to a task - it could be commited /proposed
status. This will permit PWA to aggregate the resource's load.

For Item(2) , you must be have permission as resource manager, so as to have
reports for the resource center and build cubes that suit business.

hope this helps

/pd