Resource Group Best Pratice Question

[Terry Montgomery]

Greetings,

We have a current project which I have published on Project Server. I have
already established enterprise resources for this project. However, our
customer has their own IT shop which has identified tasks they need to do on
their side for the project. I am now incorporating their project tasks into
our project plan. The customer will not have access to PWA. Do I use a local
resource sheet within the published project plan to identify customer
resources while keeping the enterprise resources for our internal use with
PWA? Can you even do this? I also want to use a Resource Group field so I can
sort and group resources and tasks within Project Professional for reporting
and analysis. If I have a local and an enterprise resource group hwo do I
utilize this field within one Task Sheet View? Any best practice suggestions?

Thanks,
Terry Montgomery
Fort Worth, Tx

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Terry --

In your situation, you could certainly add one or more local resources to
your project to indicate team members on the customer side. You could enter
the actual names of the people, or you could use skill descriptions such as
DBA, Software Developer, Executive, etc. If you do elect to use local
resources, you could also put them into a Group called something like
Customer in the Resource Sheet view of the project .

When you add local resources to a project, you will need to double-click
each local resource and set the Workgroup value to None in the Resource
Information dialog. This will eliminate those pesky "Manager cannot create
account..." spooler errors when you publish assignments.

Also, if you use local resources in your project, you will need to manually
enter progress for them in your Microsoft Project plan since they will not
have user accounts in PWA and the corresponding timesheets as well.
Depending on how you are tracking progress, you might be able to use the
default task Tracking table for this purpose. To use it, apply the Gantt
Chart view and then click View - Table - Tracking. You will see columns
there that might match your method of tracking. You could also enter
actuals for the local resources in the Resource Usage view if that matches
your method of tracking. To do this, apply the Resource Sheet view,
right-click in the timephased grid and select the Actual Work details. Just
some thoughts. Perhaps the others will have some ideas for you also.