Resource allocation

[Mike C]

We have projects in our company that are year long utilities. These are flat
loaded with resources for a % of their time for the whole year. This is more
to lock away their time and give them a place to charge their time too.

I create these tasks as fixed units and set the duration for more then the
year. Each resource is added at a % of units. Everything seems to go well
until they start charging actuals. Different things seem to happen all the
time. In general, I would think, that the only change should be in duration
as they charge more or less time to the project vs what we originally
allocated them. If they charge more, thier max units changes to the higher %
and sometimes the spread of hours on the task changes. Shouldn't just the
duration change?

Thanks

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Mike C --

The Units value that you see for the resource to the right of the Gantt bar
is known as the Peak Units value. The Peak Units value represents the
largest amount of Work or Actual Work for the resource on that task during
any time period during the life of the task. Fpr example, if you assign the
resource to the task at 10% Units, the system initially sets the Peak Units
value to 10%, which is what you see before you update actuals for that task.

When you begin updating actuals for the resource on that task, and the
resource enter 6 hours of Actual Work during a single week (for example),
the software will recalculate the Peak Units value at 15%, since 6 hours of
Actual Work represents 15% of a 40-hour work week. Please note, however,
that the software DOES NOT change the Units assignment across the REMAINDER
of the task, except for the last week probably. You can confirm this by
applying the Resource Usage view for the project and looking at the Work
assigned to the resource in each remaining time period. In addition, the
Duration of the task can also change, depending on how much Actual Work the
resource has currently entered to date. Hope this helps.