Non-working days on enterprise/project/resource level

[Dennis]

Hi all,
my task is to evaluate how Project Server 2007 can help my organization to
manage non-working days in a central and consistent way, compared to Project
Professional. I have played around with the Enterprise Resource Pool and
Enterprise Calendars. Also, I have read the relevant newsgroup entries.

Now the best solution I could come up with still has some shortcomings, and
I would be happy if someone could point out a better solution with Project
Server 2007 (or confirm that things are really that limited).

Here's the scenario: we have global non-working days (bank holidays),
project specific non-working days (e.g. no work to be scheduled on
Wednesdays), and resource non-working days (vacation).

My solution: Create a base calendar for the project. Enter all global and
project-specific nw-days in the new project calendar. Vacation and other
resource-specific exceptions are entered in resource calendars.
To make sure that assigned tasks are not scheduled for holidays or
Wednesdays (project nw-day), I have to assign the project calendar as the
base calendar for all my resources working on that project.

This solution has at least two obvious limitations:
First of all I have to set global holidays in project calendars of ALL my
projects (a lot of extra work).
Secondly, the resource is bound to ONE project via its base calendar. If a
resource is assigned a different project (let's say for a future project),
the current scheduling in the current project will be broken, because
project-specific nw-days are not accounted for any longer. An alternative to
assigning the project calendar as the resource base calendar would be to set
it as the task calendar for ALL my tasks in the project. However, this seems
to be even more maintenance overhead, doesn't it?

Non-working days on enterprise, project, and resource levels should be
common in all organizations, so my feeling is there must be better support
for this scenario. Any comments are highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dennis

 

[NZ Projects]

You can use the timesheet to record non availability such as vacaction etc.

 

[Dennis]

I noticed that I missed the fact that the project calendar is the default
calendar for tasks. It is therefore neither necessary to assign the project
calendar as the base calendar for resources nor to assign a specific calendar
to tasks.