actual resource?

[Fei]

e.g. I have a task which as planned to start on 22/03/07 with 6 hours or work
by resource Tim. When the project started Tim was unavailable on 22/03/07.
The task was then postponed. However Tim was still unavailable for the task 3
days later. The project manager had to modify the task and the task ended up
be done on 26/03/07 for 7 hours or work done by another resource Chris.

In this case I am able to use actual work, actual start and actual finish to
keep track of the date time and work changes. Is there also a way to keep
track of the resource change? I couldn't find an 'actual resource' column.....

 

[Dave]

You could use the baseline work field. Essentially what you are
describing is a problem of how to view the actual work carried out by
resources on a task against what you originally planned should take
place. Because of this you are looking at a resource-centric or
task-centric view and you can get this information from either the
Resource or Task Usage views.

In those views you can insert the baseline work column and you can also
insert the baseline work and actual work rows in the timephased area of
the view.

 

[Fei]

thanks Dave for your quick reply. My project is task centric and I am using
baseline work, which stores the originally planed hours for the task and I am
using actual work to store the actual hours spent on the task. However, I am
not sure how to use the 'work' fields to store 'resource' if that's what you
meant. Ideally I'd like to have a 'actual resource' column which stores the
value 'Chris'. Does such a column exist?
sorry if i sound a bit dumb

 

[Dave]

Well from a task-centric point of view I am not sure that it makes sense
in the generality of planning. If you have tasks which are only worked
on by single resources then I can describe a sort of workaround below.
However what if you assigned A and B to a task where A was originally to
do 90 hours and B 10 but in practice the workloads were reversed? What
would you want to see then.

If you just want to see resource changes (as in added/removed), then you
can add the resource names column and another text column (Text1 say),
this can be renamed to read "Original Resource". Then by clicking on
the header you can copy the entire resource names column to the Text1
column.

The process above would highlight changes. Changes could be made even
more transparent by parsing the results but that is a bit more work.

Hope this is more along the lines of what you want.

Incidentally, all projects are task-centric, but that doesn't mean that
the other views are not possible or of value.

Hope this helps.