Resource Capacity and Slack View/Report

[JoeJV]

Hi,
I am new to MS Project and did not see this addressed in a previous thread:
I have a fixed number of resources that I have assigned to my project's
tasks. I would like to see a view and print a report that shows how much
total slack is available for an individual resource (not the tasks), by
calendar month. I have looked at the workload and resource usage report but
this only shows work or work availability and not in a graphical format.
What we have done previously is enter the information manually into excel.
In that case we simply entered in the total number of resrouces required for
a particular task (1, 1.5 ,etc) for a particular month. Resources and tasks
for the rows, months for the columns. Then we would use excel to create a
graph which would give us an idea of project slack available for a particular
month (i.e. how we are using our resources for a particular month). I'd like
to do the same thing with Project, preferably in a graph. Even if I have to
export this info to excel and graph it that would also be ok. Ideally, we
would roll this information up into a department report that will would
contain of this information for each project in the department. I guess this
would be a view which shows total number of resrouces, and how they are
allocated (under or over) over time, as opposed to a seperate view for each.
Can Project do this natively or do I need to purchase some kind of add in?

Thanks in advance,
Joe

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Joe,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Have you tried the Resource Graph view? If you right-click in the graph
area you can choose Remaining Availability?

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

"Slack" as used in MSP refers to task start and end dates and they amount of
time they could be delayed without affecting tasks downstream, not
resources. Are you perhaps thinking of utilization versus availability,
What you're calling "slack" being the remaining amount of time a resource
has available for assignment before they go over their maximum availability?
If so, go to the Resource Usage view and add the Remaining Availability
field to the lines displayed in the timeline side.

 

[JoeJV]

Yes, thanks. That was what I was thinking of. I then used looked at your
FAQ's and exported this view to excel, which also graphed the data for me!
Thanks again!

Joe