How to let project assign work to multiple resources unevenly?

[hhspiny]

I have spent almost entire night searching for an answer. it seems that
when you add multiple resources to a task, project always split the
work between resource evenly, which causes unused resource over the
course.

take a very simple situation.

I have a task that takes 8 man-hours to finish. I can only work 6 hour
a day.

1. assign myself to the task, total will be 1 day plus 2 hours next
day.

to keep within the one day limit, I hire a helper, who demands payment,
therefore, I need to make his work time as little as possible. in
project

2. I add the helper to the project. hoping that I still work 6 hours a
I could, but only assign the extra 2 hours to the help. BUT, project
doesnot think so. project would split the 8 hours between me and the
helper. each gets 4 hours. I end up wasting 2 hours, paying extra 2
hours to the helper.

given the above is simple situation, and you can adjust manually. but
when many tasks and resources are involved. it is not possible to
adjust manually.

How to avoid such in project?


Another similar situation, that doesnot target cost but the duration

I have a task take 8 man-hours. I can work 4 hours a day. helper can
only work 1 hours a day.

1. assign myself to the task. takes 2 days.

2. add the helper to the task. project split evenly the work, I get 4
hours, the helper gets 4 hours. but since the helper works 1 hour a
day, it take 4 days to finish the project. wowo, what is the logic???


I have search in the past newsgroup discussion. but never saw anyone
answered such problem.

 

[Brian K - Project MVP]

I have spent almost entire night searching for an answer. it seems that
when you add multiple resources to a task, project always split the
work between resource evenly, which causes unused resource over the
course.

take a very simple situation.

I have a task that takes 8 man-hours to finish. I can only work 6 hour
a day.

1. assign myself to the task, total will be 1 day plus 2 hours next
day.

to keep within the one day limit, I hire a helper, who demands payment,
therefore, I need to make his work time as little as possible. in
project

2. I add the helper to the project. hoping that I still work 6 hours a
I could, but only assign the extra 2 hours to the help. BUT, project
doesnot think so. project would split the 8 hours between me and the
helper. each gets 4 hours. I end up wasting 2 hours, paying extra 2
hours to the helper.

given the above is simple situation, and you can adjust manually. but
when many tasks and resources are involved. it is not possible to
adjust manually.

How to avoid such in project?


Another similar situation, that doesnot target cost but the duration

I have a task take 8 man-hours. I can work 4 hours a day. helper can
only work 1 hours a day.

1. assign myself to the task. takes 2 days.

2. add the helper to the task. project split evenly the work, I get 4
hours, the helper gets 4 hours. but since the helper works 1 hour a
day, it take 4 days to finish the project. wowo, what is the logic???


I have search in the past newsgroup discussion. but never saw anyone
answered such problem.

You can assign the helper at a smaller Units value when you assign them.
With some math you can figure out what percentage 1 hour or 4 hours or
whatever is of your total work day and make a note of it. Then when you
need to assign this person to do one hour you can assign them with this
units value.

You could also use the Resource Work form. In the gantt chart view click
Window | Split. Then in the right hand blank portion right click and pick
Resource Work.

Now select a task. Then in teh lower portion you can enter one resource
and put 6 hours of work. Then pick another resource and put in 2 hours
then click OK. The task which was a 1 day duration task with 8 hours work
will still be that but now unevenly spread across 2 people.

 

[hhspiny]

thank Brian. I came to know of these work around myself. but the manual
operations negates the need for a planner software. I would have to
keep track of each person's work load, and also the task's total work
load. instead of ask the software to divide a fixed (and much easier
to estimate) total work load to different people.

it would be hard to estimate how much percentage of the helper's time
or work load of the helper I need to add (instead of just add the
helper). I need to know current overtime, helper's work schedule,
helper's total time etc. .. lots of information to track before making
such manual adjustment. I would expect software costs half ground be
a little smarter than that.

 

[Brian K - Project MVP]

thank Brian. I came to know of these work around myself. but the manual
operations negates the need for a planner software. I would have to
keep track of each person's work load, and also the task's total work
load. instead of ask the software to divide a fixed (and much easier
to estimate) total work load to different people.

it would be hard to estimate how much percentage of the helper's time
or work load of the helper I need to add (instead of just add the
helper). I need to know current overtime, helper's work schedule,
helper's total time etc. .. lots of information to track before making
such manual adjustment. I would expect software costs half ground be
a little smarter than that.

If you dont know it how is Project supposed to know it for you? How would
project know their schedule unless you enter it into their calendar? you
are asking Project to know specific things about your resources that you
say you dont know. Project is not designed to schedule for you. It
provides you the tools to schedule.

You could edit the calendars of your resources to show that you are only
available 6 hours a day or that your helper is only available X hours a
day. This might also help.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Think of it this way ... Project's job is more to tell you the answer to the
question "if I assign the work this way, when will we finish the project?"
than it is to manage the resources to answer "what assignments best fit into
this schedule?" It is fundamentally a schedule management tool, not so much
a resource management tool per se.

To help with assignments like your examples, I usually suggest using the
split screen to setup the resources. Your first example - there are 10
man-hours required on the task. If you split the screen you can enter
yourself at 100% units doing 8 man-hours and your assistant as doing 2
man-hours. Clicking OK will assign it that way for a 1 day duration. Note
that you can get the same result assigning the assistant 100% or 25% doing
it that way - 100% meaning the assistant comes in to help the first 2 hours
then goes away or by putting a delay in you can have him come in the last 2
hours while 25% indicates he's there all day helping out on that task while
juggling it with other things he's doing at the same time.

 

[Sid]

Guys,

I think what is being asked here is if there is possibly some way of
assigning costs to resources (yes there is - and perhaps the cost for own
staff could be put at 0 and hired staff at 10 or something) and then asking
Project to work out the scheduling of resources to tasks to minimise the cost?

Don't know if this is possible, but if so, it might make it easier than
trying to edit individual calendars since these would change from week to
week.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Nope, Project doesn't even come close to doing that. It NEVER assigns
resources to tasks or works out task scheduling based on projected costs.
In fact, the schedule oes actually affect the costs in any signfigant way to
begin with. If I have to do a task that requires 8 hours and the resource
doing it costs $10 per hour, that task will cost $80 whether I schedule it
for Monday or Tuesday.

Cost data in project is the cost of doing the required work. And FYI the
project cost of using internal staff is definitely not ever zero. If
internal resource Joe is working on your project he's not able to be doing
something else. While putting him on your project hasn't cost the firm any
incremental payroll expense, it ties him up so he can't be doing something
else for those hours. This creates what is called an "opportunity cost"
which is the cost of the lost opportunity presented by what he could have
been doing instead of your project. So the bottom line is whether Joe is an
internal salaried resource or a temp hired-on specifically for the one task,
if he gets $10 per hour and you put him on a 40 hour task, the cost to the
firm of doing that task is $400. A project will require X man-hours of work
and the pattern in which you assign the resources won't change it. True,
you might have Joe at $10 per hour and Bill at $20 both qualified to do a
task and so it would cost you less to assign Joe than Bill but Project has
no knowledge of who is and who is not qualified with the skills to do the
required work.

The truth is that software can never replace the skills of an educated
user - with apologies to software marketers, there is no such thing as a
"software solutions." Giving someone MS Word isn't sufficient to make them
a professional writer, giving them Excel won't make them a mathematician,
and giving them Project won't make them a project manager, providing all the
management strategic planning and tactical decision making skills that
function requires. The bottom line is that it's only a glorified calculator
designed to give you the information you need to make informed management
decisions.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[Sid]

Steve

I agree that the cost of an internal resource is never 0. The rationale was
put forward to simply illustrate a cost differential at a conceptual level
(and before somebody says so, yes the cost of an internal resource is
generally a lot higher than simply their payroll cost as well).

However another issue that comes up - one that I am facing right now is as
follows:

What I've done so far...
I have a bunch of tasks for for which I have defined dependencies (where
appropriate), identified who in my team is best suited to doing them, defined
the individual calendars for each person (including holidays and stuff),
identified the person-hours (work) required for each task and in most cases
also defined the duration - especially where something might take 2 hours but
still take 10 days to complete since we are waiting for responses from other
agencies (I've cheated a bit and not included every single minute task here,
but defined a longer duration with shorter person-hours). The work for each
person is calculated on the rationale of reducing the hours they work in a
day as appropriate.

Also, the project has a number of tasks that need to be done by the same
resource but are not sequential by nature (eg set up servers and set up
projectors). However there is a clear constraint that no one can do them all
at the same time. To try and help, I've defined priorities for each of the
tasks.

The problem...
Needless to say, like with all first cuts there is a huge level of
overallocation. What I want to do, is to get project to simply tell me when
I can hope to finish the project by, given the constraints defined. I've
tried using the 'level resources' function, but still have overallocations!
Also, there are times when I have identified that a resource will be
available for 5 hours in the day, their calendar shows they have 0.7 hours of
work and they are still being shown as overallocated!

Any thoughts?

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Overallocations are not based on total or mean utilizations but rather
instantaeous utilization. An example I use in classes: Mary works an 8
hour day, 8-5, and has a max availability of 100%. On Monday she is
assigned to 2 tasks, assigned 100% to each. The first task is 4hour long.
The second task is 2 hours long. But she's shown as overallocated! Now to
my reckoning 4 hours plus 2 hours is 6 hours. 6/8 is 75%. She's allowed to
be booked for 8, she's only booked for 6 ... what gives?

The answer is we have ignored the times during which the tasks are
scheduled. Task 1 is 4 hours running from 8am to 12 noon. Task 2 is the
monthly staff meeting scheduled from 8am to 10am. While her total workload
is only 6 man-hours, between 8am and 10am she's booked to be in two places
at once and for that time period her allocation is 200% somehow expected to
accomplish a total of 4 hours of work in 2 hours of time.

IMHO the duration of a task should is not defined as you have suggested in
your example. If I have a task that can start Monday, requires 2 hours to
complete after it starts, and then requires a response from someone before
we can proceed on to the next task and we figure the response will take 10
days, that task is NOT a 10 day duration task. If I'm going to assign my
resource 100%, it is a 2 hour duration task followed by a 10 day lag time in
the link to its successor. Also remember the assignment units represents
the *rate* at which duration time spent on the task is converted into work
ouput and it's not accurate to think of it as the percentage of the
resource's work day that is spent on a given task the way many people do.
If the task requires 4 man-hours of work to accomplish, a 100% assignment
means we expect the resource to spend 4 hours doing it, working at full
capacity. While 4 hours is 50% of his workday, if he's going to spend half
a day working on it start to finish his assignment is 100%, not 50%. A 50%
assignment means we expect the resource to spend 8 hours doing it because he
has to juggle off the work with his other obligations. A 25% assignment
means we expect the resource to take 16 hours from start to finish, having a
LOT of other stuff demanding his attention in addition to our task over that
time period. The only time thinking of the assignment as a percentage of
the workday is when the task requires 4 hours of work but we're going to
allow him a day's time to do it, letting him manage what he's doing
minute-by-minute for his own workday. After all, it's not our job to
micromanage our resources. In out project plan we'll show that task as a 1
day task with him assigned 50% to it. This works fine as long as we keep it
crystal clear in our own mind just what we mean by those numbers.

 

[Sid]

Thanks Steve

I suspect that what it boils down to - from the perspective of a user who
ends up having to use Project as a combination of direction setting (creating
mini projects) and micro management (individual tasks eg do a, b, c) one has
to almost reconcile oneself to a level of error reporting on some of the
screens.

The alternatives are being very very thorough and consistent in what goes
into the plan (after all GI..GO!) or spending an enormous amount of time
resolving issues even before starting the tasks!

Sid

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

It depends on the scale of the project but your latter remark is right on
target. For micro-projects, typically with budgets under 250 kilobucks,
somewhere around 15% to 20% of the total time and budget might be spent in
developing the plan while with macro-projects it can range up to 30% or so,
often before any of the actual project tasks are begun!

Some helpful rules of thumb ... Firstly, a summary task documents the
creation of a specific deliverable while its subtasks define all of the work
required to accomplishes it. So insure that all performance tasks (ie,
everything except milestones and summary tasks) describe concrete actions -
dig the hole, paint the wall, write the program module, train the worker-
with measurable outcomes. Second, If you define a resource as a package of
skills working as a unit (rather than a person per se - for instance a
surgical team is several people but they have to work together on the
appendectomy task as a unit), you decompose the tasks to the level of detail
where a task becomes a discrete block of work requiring 1 resource. And
finally, apply the 8/80 rule, meaning that if your tasks are less that about
8 hours duration you're overly micro-managing (and perhaps alienating) your
resources while if they're more than about 80 hours you're not breaking the
tasks down into sufficient detail to effectively schedule the work.
Obviously there are going to be a lot of exceptions to the last but it's
worth keeping in mind as a first-order approximation.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[Sid]

Thanks Steve - helpful stuff all of it, especially the rules of thumb as it
were. Sometimes one ends up doing these things instinctively (which I have
always believed is something one needs to get project management right - on a
day to day basis a lot of it boils down to feel, but only if at least planned
at a fundamental level)! but its great to hear it from an expert as well.