Help needed for Resource utilization

[Irfan]

Hi There, in my company, we've got plenty of projects being delivered each
week and we do not follow any PM tool. We do not have any Project
plans either. We only make use of our own way, mostly MS Excel, where in we
have the PROJECTNAME, TECHLEAD FOR THIS PROJECT, DEVELOPMENT COMPLETIONDATE
& CURRENT STATUS

I now have a need of maintaining all the resource info. viz which resource
is working on which project, for how long, and when is a resource free to be
placed into another/new project.

At any given instance, I need to search for a person's name within the sheet
to know who is free, when..etc. I thought of MS Project & Project Server. I
remember of something called as Resource Center within... How can I make use
of MS
Project & Project Server to know the resource utilization? I understand that
I would have to use a project plan, upload it into project server and then be
able to view, but how can I go forward without having any project plan with
no resources assigned to any tasks?? I mean, resources assigned on project
level rather than task level.

Thanks for your time in reading my long question!!
irfan

 

[Mark Everett | PMP]

Hi There, in my company, we've got plenty of projects being delivered each
week and we do not follow any PM tool. We do not have any Project
plans either. We only make use of our own way, mostly MS Excel, where in we
have the PROJECTNAME, TECHLEAD FOR THIS PROJECT, DEVELOPMENT COMPLETIONDATE
& CURRENT STATUS

I now have a need of maintaining all the resource info. viz which resource
is working on which project, for how long, and when is a resource free to be
placed into another/new project.

At any given instance, I need to search for a person's name within the sheet
to know who is free, when..etc. I thought of MS Project & Project Server. I
remember of something called as Resource Center within... How can I make use
of MS
Project & Project Server to know the resource utilization? I understand that
I would have to use a project plan, upload it into project server and thenbe
able to view, but how can I go forward without having any project plan with
no resources assigned to any tasks?? I mean, resources assigned on project
level rather than task level.

Thanks for your time in reading my long question!!
irfan

Irfan,

The short answer is yes. In Project Server 2007, you could assign
resources at a top level (not to a summary) and track them using the
Resource Availability or Resource Allocation view, as well as Data
Analysis views. But again, it's not good practice to assign resources
to summary levels. In your case, it would probably look like this:

Project Summary
Phase (if you use phases)
Task (resource assignments)

You could set up some custom fields to list the tech lead and project
status and you would have the data you need, quickly and easily.


You could also explore using the Activity Plan functionality in PWA if
you don't need a lot of detail on task assignments or massaging of a
persons assignments.

HTH,
Mark Everett | PMP
www.catapultsystems.com