Wilt --
Here's one way that I envision you could use the Resource Plan feature:
1. You create a Proposal for a project that starts 6 months in the future.
You use a Proposal rather than an enterprise project because your
organization mandates that all projects begin with a Proposal.
2. You want to "reserve" certain resources for that proposed project.
Because of limitations of the Proposal feature, such as allowing you to
assign only ONE RESOURCE on each task, you elect to use a Resource Plan to
"reserve" the resources.
3. In the Resource Plan, you build the team of people you want to "reserve"
and then you book them for the general time periods you want them in the
future. For example, you might book a certain resource at 1 FTE, indicating
full-time work, over a one-month period of time.
4. In the Resource Plan, you also indicate that you want the system to
display availability information from the Resource Plan.
5. After saving the Resource Plan, you publish the project.
This information shows up on the View Availability feature when your PM's
and RM's look at the availability of the resources you selected in the
Resource Plan. If your PM's and RM's honor the system, the will not take
your resources and book them on projects that occur during the time periods
in which you have "reserved" the resources in the Resource Plan. Do know,
however, that the system will NOT prevent them from doing so, therefore, you
must make this a "training and performance" issue.
6. Your Proposal is approved, so you convert it to an enterprise project
and completely plan the project, including assigning resources to tasks.
7. At this point you are ready to "dump" the Resource Plan. From the
Project Center page, select the row header for the project and click the
Resource Plan button. Select the option that uses the enterprise project
for calculating resource availability and save the Resource Plan.
That's one way to use this feature. Perhaps the others have some ideas as
well. Hope this helps.
