Staffing

[Steve]

I am trying to use Microsoft Project to track and allocate staff office wide.
As part of this effort I am tracking vacation time and professional
development time. I need to see the vacation time (to discuss available
resources) and allocate the resource (staff) to a task that has a duration
that extends across the vacation time. I want to see and print the vacation
of all staff in a gant chart format and I want to show the vacation relative
to the employees work load so that it is easy to see the impact of the
proposed or approved vacation time.

The only way I have found to do this is to change to a "Task Entry View" and
have the top screen set in "Resource Graph" mode and the bottom screen set in
"Tracking Gant" mode. This allows me to see all of the tasks the resouce is
assigned to. If I assign the vacation like a task then I can see the
vacation along with the project tasks and deadlines. Of course this results
in an overallocation which I don't want to see. How can I assign the
vacation without the overallocation?

Also, I cannot find how to print both screens together in the "Task Entry
View". The system will only print the active window. I have to do a
printscreen and actually paste the image to a Word file. Any help with this
issue would be greatly appreciated. PS I am using MSP 2003.

 

[Jim Aksel]

You can enter employee availability by individual employee. On the resource
sheet, double click on any resource. In the General tab, you can change the
resource availability. You will be doing the opposite of what you want --
you are showing when they are available, not when they are on vacation.

This is actually a more general solution because a resource may be
unavailble for many reasons such as vacation, other projects, jury duty,
training, etc.

Pull the "Working Time" tab, you can set availability down to the minute on
any desired days. This will be different than the main calendar applied to
the entire project as it will be married to the one resource.

Go to the Resource Graph. If you right click over the resource name and
select "resource Information" you get to the same place I just described.
However, if you right click on the graph portion, you can select items such
as Remaining Availabiilty, Work Availability. Notice that the Availability
graphs will respect the entries made in the availability areas discussed
above.

Point of philosphy -- some people only schedule the project work at 85%
availability leaving the employee 15% of their time for Dr Appointments,
other work, going to training classes etc. Others put the availability at
100% and then make certain to block out as unavailable time for jury duty,
training, vacation as it happens. It will depend on your purpose for the
file -- Usually an MS Project file is for a specific project with a start
date, end date, budget, and performance tasks. You would only enter into
that file items that are budgeted for in the contract for that project. So,
if a person assigned to the project had to go to 2 days of Ethics Training as
part of overhead, you would mark him as unavailable during that time unless
the project was paying for the training.

Your situation is a little different since you are tracking some other
things. You may want to put all the activities in just for sake of
completeness. We don't do it that way because we are working with projects
not general availability.

Printing --- Well the screen shot approach seems to work best. I think there
are some other ideas floating around out there, perhaps we will see
additional traffic for you.
--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim
It''s software; it''s not allowed to win.

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for FAQs and more information
about Microsoft Project

 

[John]

I am trying to use Microsoft Project to track and allocate staff office wide.
As part of this effort I am tracking vacation time and professional
development time. I need to see the vacation time (to discuss available
resources) and allocate the resource (staff) to a task that has a duration
that extends across the vacation time. I want to see and print the vacation
of all staff in a gant chart format and I want to show the vacation relative
to the employees work load so that it is easy to see the impact of the
proposed or approved vacation time.

The only way I have found to do this is to change to a "Task Entry View" and
have the top screen set in "Resource Graph" mode and the bottom screen set in
"Tracking Gant" mode. This allows me to see all of the tasks the resouce is
assigned to. If I assign the vacation like a task then I can see the
vacation along with the project tasks and deadlines. Of course this results
in an overallocation which I don't want to see. How can I assign the
vacation without the overallocation?

Also, I cannot find how to print both screens together in the "Task Entry
View". The system will only print the active window. I have to do a
printscreen and actually paste the image to a Word file. Any help with this
issue would be greatly appreciated. PS I am using MSP 2003.

SteveP,
Well, you are trying to use Project for something it was not designed to
do. Project is designed to track the working time of schedules. Vacation
and other off times are exceptions to working time and Project's
scheduling engine takes them into account when calculating a schedule
but there is no facility for displaying off-time in the same manner as
working time. If you show off-time as a task, then Project will treat it
as a normal task and take it into account when considering
overallocations, and that's exactly what you are seeing. There is no way
around that.

Project does not have the functionality to print split screens. The only
way to show both panes is to individually print each pane and then paste
them together.

So how do you get there from here? Well, there are probably several
methods. One that comes to mind is to have two separate schedules - one
for the normal working time and a separate schedule that shows only
off-time. They would of course need to be linked in some fashion so they
track, and there are ways to do that. Setting this up is a bit of a pain
in the kester but it will give you what you want without overallocations.

As far as showing both schedules in a single view, you could create a
master and then configure a filtered view of the master to show any
given resource's working and non-working time. I haven't actually tried
something like this, but it should be feasible.

John
Project MVP