MSP Server 2003: how to plan and level shared resources?

[Kurt Petteloot]

Hi,

Some of the resources work on several projects at the same time. What is
usually done is that an agreement is made between the PM's about the
availability of these shared resources for their projects. For instance
project mgr A and B agree that resource 'x' will work on project A for
2days/week and 3days/week on project B until a specific date, after which the
agreement could change (for instance 1d/wk on project A and 4d/wk on project
B).

Project manager A has to level this resource using a maximum availability of
40% until the day when his availability drops to 20%. Similar constraints for
project manager B.
Te challenge is to allow these project managers to use the automatic
leveling functionality which is based on the availability set for the
enterprise resource. However this availability is maintained centrally. This
means that there is no way to capture the availability of that resource for a
specific project.
Does anyone know of any best practices or possible solutions? How do
organizations manage the fact that they use resources that are shared across
concurrently executing projects?

Thanks for any feedback
Kind Regards
Kurt

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

This is a big weakness of MS Project Server and there isn't any system
feature that can help you do this through the tool. The only answer I have
is to continue to do this outside the system by having the proper
communication and process in place between the PMs.

You need to use Data Analysis (OLAP) views to report on over allocations
across all projects in a time phase manner but there is not indication what
project is responsible for pushing a resource over their capacity inside the
tool.

Jonathan

 

[Kurt Petteloot]

Hi Jonathan,

We do have such communication and process in place between PM's. What is
really missing is that feature that helps the PM to level his resources
within his project according to the agreements made.

It's still in its early stages, but I did develop a proof of concept which
is going to be tested next week. The idea is to capture the agreements in a
separate project on the dabase (we wall this the 'sharedResources' project).
Within this project I have a local resource for each shared resource with the
same name as the enterprise resource, but suffixed with an '*'. I then create
tasks for each project to which this resource has been assigned and i assign
the resource to the task. I then use the task usage view and enter the agreed
upon availabilities as work on the tasks representing the project.

From within the Pm's project a macro can be executed that reads the
timescaled values from the central sharedResources project and translates
these into availabilities on the resource. This allows the PM to level his
resources within the availabilities that were agreed.

Like I said, still in its early stages, but this looks something like a
solution for our problem. Any ideas are welcome.

Regards.
Kurt

 

[Jonathan Sofer]

That sounds interesting. Let us know how the POC goes.

 

[Kurt Petteloot]

Hi Jonathan

it's been a while. To be honest I completely forgot about this post.
Anyway... just wanted to let you know that the POC has been succesfully
implemented in the operational environment.

Kind regards
Kurt