Resource Planning

[Mike C]

Thanks in advance for your help.

Is there a way to truely plan resources for the coming year in MS Project
server? This would also include projects we know will be initiated at some
point during the year, but not exact dates. We have a tool outside of
Project server that allows resource managers to enter hours for resources
week by week or month by month for the coming quarter/year. We look at this
as the Plan. We do not want this to change based on actuals. Is there any
way to use Project server to plan in a similar way? Is there any plug-ins
anyone knows of that can do something similar?

Thanks

 

[Rick Roszko]

There are many ways to do this but if you want to track actuals against
planned and keep the planned from "moving", all you have to do is create your
plan in MS Project as always, then "baseline" it. (Tools, then Tracking, then
Save Baseline).

(You can have up to 10 Baselines, so you can take snapshots anytime, up to
10.)

This will preserve your planned data. You will need to "insert" additional
columns to see the baseline values, such as Baseline Start, Baseline Finish,
Baseline Work, Baseline etc. to see these figures.

To see the baseline and actuals simultaneously, use the "Tracking Gantt View".

Does that answer your question, or was there somthing I missed? Thanx.

 

[mark.everett]

Mike C -

There are couple of ways you can approach this. One way is to use
generic resources to represent actual resources and apply them to the
tasks for projects in The Plan.

The other way is to assign actual resources as proposed resources
(change the booking type from committed to proposed).

In either case, you can use the portfolio modeler to play what if's or
you can use OLAP data (which will show proposed resources) to create a
view, export the view to Excel and play "what if" with it there.

Hope this helps,
Mark Everett | PMP
www.quantumpm.com