Assigning a worker with varying avaliability

[dabevan]

Hi,

I've got a task (TaskA) in my project that is going to take a fixed
number of man-days (ie work) to complete - say 50 man days (400 man
hours).

I've got Fred who has varying avaliability over the comming weeks. ie
he is 50% avaliable this week, 0% the next week, then 100% for a couple
of weeks, then back down to 50% for the remainder. ...I can set Freds
avaliability in the resource avaliability section.

I want to assign Fred to "Task A" and ask him to finish the task ASAP,
but if i assign him as 100% then MSProj only puts him on the tasks in
weeks when he is 100% avaliable.

....how do I get it to automatically assigning him as 50% in week 1, 0%
week 2, 100% weeks 3 & 4 and 50% for the remainder. (ie make as much use
of Fred as possible)?


Many Thanks

David Bevan

 

[JulieS]

Hello David,

When you assign a resource to a task, Project makes the assignment
unit equal to the resource's max. unit at the start of the
assignment -- assuming a max. unit of 100% or less.

In the situation you cite below, Project would assign Fred at 50%
for the entire duration of the task and Fred would appear
overallocated for the 1 week his availability is set to zero. For
the two weeks he is available at 100%, he would be "underallocated".

I can come up with two different manners of handling the
situation -- neither are what I would term "automatic".

1) Split the 400 hours of work into 3 separate tasks
For the week of zero availability, mark the week as non-working time
in Fred's calendar. Modify the resource availability to increase to
100% for the two week span.
Task 1 - 20 hours of work, 5 days duration, Fred assigned at 50%
Task 2 linked F to S to Task 1 - 80 hours of work, 10 days duration,
Fred assigned at 100%. Because of Fred's non-working time, the
start of the task will shift by one week
Task 3 linked F to S to Task 2 - 300 hours of work, 75 days
duration, Fred assigned at 50%.

2) Make the modification's to Fred's availability (I would still use
non-working time for the zero availability). Assign Fred and then
go to the Resource Usage view and manually modify the two weeks work
to 8 hours.

All that being said -- I would suggest a rethink of your approach.
A task with 400 hours (10 weeks fulltime) seems a bit long -- are
there logical deliverables somewhere in this 400 hours of work?
Does it make sense to break the task into deliverable oriented
tasks?

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

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

 

[dabevan]

Thanks, the project I describe is a hyperthetical one, but the problem
is generic to most projects I work on.

ie...

Tasks are defined as needing a fixed amount of work to complete them.

Resources avaliability varies from day to day/week to week, so I need
to assign the resources whenever I know I will have them.

...I find it odd that any MS Proj cannot assign a resource based on
their avaliability.

I could, as you say, manually assign hours each week and MS Proj will
warn me when I've over allocated a resource, but since it knows when
I've over allocated I can't see why there is no option to tell it to
just allocate to the max?

There must be some kind of work round for this, as surely this is a
really fundemental requirement?

Thanks

David Bevan

 

[JulieS]

Hi David,

I do understand your point and your concern. As I noted before,
Project assigns a resource to tasks at the resource's max. units at
the start of the task. It then applies a flat contour spreading the
work evenly across the duration of the task.

My suggestion would be two fold -- for times when the resource is
not available to your project, use non-working time. Then I would
get a commitment from management for a certain "average"
availability if possible. If one week the resource is available at
50% and the next week at 100%, is it acceptable to assign the
resource at 75% for the two weeks? Yes, one week the resource will
be scheduled for more hours than 50% but the next week the resource
will be scheduled for fewer.

I personally would not attempt to change a resource's max. units on
a weekly basis. In my experience, it is a level of detail I don't
find useful to either calculate or to spend the time detailing in
project. If you choose to get to that level of detail, then to have
Project assign the resource you'll need to make sure the task
duration matches the variability in the max. units.

Julie

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi David,

An alternative approach is to change the resource's calendar so that he
works 4 hrs per day for the first week, zero for the 2nd, default 8 hrs for
the next 2 and back to 4 hrs for the remaining time. Project will
reschedule according to these working times and push out the end date.

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for my free Project Tutorials

 

[JulieS]

Good suggestion Mike -- thanks for adding it.
Julie

 

[dabevan]

Thanks Mike,

...so in a nut shell, rather than saying a resource is 100% or 50%
avaliable, we always say a resource is either 100% or non-working, then
we set the number of hours per day to reflect that I've only got a
fraction of that resources time.

...that sounds like it will be ideal. I'll try it out.

Cheers

Dave.

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome, Dave Yes, in my view, when actually working on a task,
they will then do so 100% of the time allotted.

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for my free Project Tutorials

 

[Andy Evans]

2) Make the modification's to Fred's availability (I would still use
non-working time for the zero availability).  Assign Fred and then
go to the Resource Usage view and manually modify the two weeks work
to 8 hours.

I've often had to deal with this problem, and wound up doing the
workaround suggested by Mike Glen of changing "the resource's calendar
so that he works 4 hrs per day for the first week, zero for the 2nd,
default 8 hrs for the next 2 and back to 4 hrs for the remaining
time." This is cumbersome but needed even if tasks are broken down
into small hourly chunks, if people are available according to
schedules like "50% in June and 70% in July" because even a small task
could span the end of a month.

But I've often wondered why no one has created a macro that could
apply the manual Resource Usage editing approach suggested by JulieS,
but do it automatically.

Specifically,
1. Go through each task in the Resource Usage view.
2. For each day in the task, look for each cell that has more or less
work assigned to it than the maximum allowed.
3. If found such as cell, adjust the work to equal the maximum allowed
for that resource on that day.
4. Repeat this until all the hours of the task are accounted for.
5. Then go to the next task for that resource, starting it after the
previous task ended.

Would this work? It would probably at least have problems with a task
that's assigned to multiple resources, or with fancy kinds of
dependencies and lags...

Actually, an even better question is why hasn't Microsoft built this
capability into Project itself?