Forgive me if I intrude Gary. I'm still trying to get my head around how
this is supposed to work because it seems Project Server's resourcing tools
are quite limited in practice. Please help me understand how this works
because it seems every time I try something I come across a brick wall that
says "it actually doesn't work the way you want it". Thanks to your and
Dale's help I have a pretty good understanding of how to level properly, the
use of generic resources, etc. I also have been reading quite seriously the
full Project 2002 traininbg curriculum. Yet it fails to properly explain how
to handle the situation below.
For example, I have a software development project with a development phase
involving 7 developers and say 100 tasks. I don't assign real resources at
the start of the project. I only want to assign resources for
phases/deliverable coming up in the next 1-3 months. How should I go about
assigning generic resources, leveling and assigning real resources? Do I
really need 7 generic resources? Doesn't this mean I need to manually spread
out the tasks based on dependencies etc. so I don't get overallocations or
gaps? It sounds like a lot of trial and error:
1. allocate 7 generic resources to the 100 tasks
2. level
3. change resources around because leveling create unexpected gaps because
things aren't spread enough (generic resource #1 does more work -
lengthening the schedule - while #2 does nothing, so assign some of #1's
tasks to #2)
4. level again, repeat, repeat, repeat until you finally get something that
looks good
5. hope that nothing changes requiring you have to reassign tasks, add tasks
and repeat the whole careful manual process above
6. manually reassign resources as the work comes up paying careful attention
to their schedule which includes other projects
What I would expect is:
1. allocate 700% generic resource to all the tasks
2. level
3. select the subset of tasks coming up
4. substitute resources and that 700% gets spread out among the free
developers.
Re: your comments below - I have got Project to replace a 200% resource with
two 100% resources before. In fact I'm pretty sure I could do the 2nd set of
steps above if project allowed me to substitute on certain tasks only.
Dave
PS. I'm not trying to cause you trouble. Just genuinely confused.