Laurie --
I believe it would help you tremendously if your company standardized a
methodology for assigning resources to tasks. Such a decision could be made
by a council of senior project managers, or by knowledgeable project
executives. Whoever makes the decision would need to have the "clout" to
make the decision stick. The methodology that is selected would need to fit
your company's way of doing business and managing projects, but it could be
centered around effort-based assignments.
When you use an effort-based methodology for assigning resources to tasks,
each project manager will need to determine two pieces of information for
each resource assignment:
1. The amount of time a resource can work on the task during a specific
time period, which will determine the Units value in the assignment. For
example, I want to assign Mickey Cobb to a task during the first week of
November, however, she is committed to work 2 days each week on the Help
desk during the entire month. Based on this information, I would need to
set Mickey Cobb's Units no higher than 60% on this task, since 40% of her
time (2 out of every 5 days) is already committed on the Help Desk.
2. The amount of "burned work" the resource will spend on the task. This
estimate should ideally come from the resource, knowing that if they provide
the estimate, this will gain their commitment to the estimate and will
probably provide a more reliable estimate. If I want Mickey Cobb to work on
a network troubleshooting task which she has done many times before on
previous projects, and she estimates that it will take approximately 20
hours, then I will set the Work value on her task assignment to 20 hours.
Using this methodology will allow Microsoft Project to calculate the
Duration of the task, which will be the SOONEST the task can be expected to
be completed. So, in the case of Mickey Cobb's assignment at 60% Units and
20 hours of Work, the Duration of this task will be 4.17 days.
In this situation, if the project manager routinely assigns Mickey Cobb to
100% Units (which too many people blindly do because they are in a hurry),
this will cause several major problems in the project:
1. Mickey Cobb IS NOT available to work full-time on the task, so the 100%
Units assignment is totally false
2. The task cannot possibly be completed in the 2.5 days that Microsoft
Project will calculate. In fact, this one task alone will slip nearly 100%
of its original Duration, simply because the project manager didn't take the
time to determine the resource's availability. So, in other words, this
project is already more than 1.5 days BEHIND schedule, and the project
hasn't even started yet!
In the real world, not all tasks require the resource to work full-time to
complete the work. The above methdology will reflect reality. However, the
solution above is not an easy one. It will require the discipline of your
project management team, plus their 100% cooperation. The moment that
anyone deviates away from this methodology means that the data in your
Project Server database is now erroneous, because one or more project
manager's numbers are not a true representation of reality. Because of
this, determining true resource availability will be difficult to
impossible, and resource leveling will be nearly useless. See? Everybody
needs to do it the same.
Please understand that these are just my opinions, but they are the
methdology I have successfully recommended to many clients over the past 3.5
years. Perhaps the others in the group will have some alternate opinions.
Hope this helps, at least a little.
--
Dale A. Howard
Enterprise Project Trainer/Consultant
Denver, Colorado
http://www.msprojectexperts.com
"We wrote the book on Project Server"
