PWA and Generic Resources

[Andrew Clark]

On similar line to previous thread. Our company wants to use a Generic
Resource such as "Fred's Development Team", rather than allocate to
individuals (who use a scrum process to allocate the tasks).

Given that individuals work 38 hours per week each and a team in 5
developers; how is it best to set up the Generic Resource. Can I allocate
(5*38=)190 hours per week to a resource? What are best alternatives or
correct way to do this please.

Many thanks, Andrew

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

You have a couple of options, I suppose.

1) Use Team Resources - which I suppose are designed for that sort of approach,
although there's a number of deficits to using Team Resources which you would
need to research before implementing.

2) Create a Named Resource named Development Team with 190 hours/week availability,
then use forms based authentication, and have everyone on the team log into
PWA with the same FBA account. I've seen that used when you have multiple
people filling a single job role in shifts - so it's not quite the same application,
but similar.

3) Create the tasks in the Project plan, assign them to a Generic resource
w/ 190 hours/week availability, then allow specific people to assign themselves
via the PWA My Tasks page. That would cause apparent overallocations if
you're not careful - as the Pm would have to remove the Generic resource
from the task to avoid double booking the work hours.

Generally, the way I would recommend is to throw those tasks in a hopper
of some sort (either a Generic resource or a Team resource) then, when the
task is assigned to an individual, give the individuals a method to transfer/take
ownership of the task. The tricky bit will be how you want to model availability
for named/generic resources while moving the tasks around.

Let me know if you need further clarification....

-A