Resource calendar / scheduling

[Marko]

I realise this may have been partly answered before, however I am new to both
MSP and to a certain extent the project environment.

My company has consultants and engineers (resources) working in various
countries and it has become increasingly difficult to monitor availability
etc.

Is there a way in which project managers can enter their resources to enable
visibility to other departments as well as be beneficial for future planning?
A calendar based system would be ideal, but any system which can be
interogated and the info easily displayed.

As I'm new to MSP, I'd be grateful if any answers were quite informative,
rather than 'one-liners'!!! How would the proj. managers enter the info and
how would a coordinator / administrator view and extract the info.?

Thanks

 

[JulieD]

Hi Marko

i'm not sure how you actually want to use MS Project in your question. If
you are using MS Project to schedule the performance of a project and have
entered your consultants as resoureces, you can edit their individual
calendars (by double clicking on the resource in the resource sheet) define
their time as working or non-working (and the actual hours that they are
working), however, MS Project will only allow you to work in one "time
zone".

Project will then reschedule the work that you assign them to, based on
their availability. However, IMHO it is difficult to "easily" see the
availability of each resource and you can not put details as to where (ie,
what country) the resource is in the calendar.

Another alternative is to use "tasks" in the project plan to advise of each
resource's availability, e.g. you can have a summary task called
Fred Bloggs
with sub-tasks like
- Africa and the dates and then DON'T assign him as a resource to this task,
just use it for a reference point.
- Annual Leave - set this task with a MUST START ON constraint and a
priority of 1000 (which means that Project will leave it alone) and then
assign him to this task so that he is not available for any other tasks
during this time period.

However, depending on the number of resources you have and how frequently
they move around this may or may not become unwieldy.

 

[Marko]

Cheers Julie,

That's useful info.

Just a thought:
Would it be possible for MSP to link into people's Outlook calendars,
extract the information and then display it in various forms. A simple
display of availability would be desirable obviously! Or is this just asking
for too much?!!!

Thanks,
Mark O

 

[JulieD]

Hi Mark

there is no functionality within project currently to enable this - i'm not
sure if it is possible using VBA code as i don't know that much about the
Outlook object model. Asking the question in the developer's group
(microsoft.public.project.developer) might get you a more detailed response.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

This isn't possible at the present but consider this political issue if it
was. Some organizations, especially project oriented organizations like
engineering firms, might expect their employees to schedule all of their
other activities - meetings, etc - around the requirements of their project
tasks. So they would expect Project to control when other activities could
be scheduled in Outlook and thus set Outlook to move appointments and refuse
to book new ones when they conflict with Project activities. Instead of
Outlook controlling when resources are available for the project, MS Project
would control when they are available to do anything else. That's sort of
the way it is now - while Project won't read their Outlook to see when they
are available, using Project Server or the Workgroup tools it is possible to
send project task assigments to the resource's Outlook to-do task list so
the resource can manage their own workday plan. I don't miss the lack of
the ability to query Outlook on the resource's availability since it seems
to me that work on the project should usually have a higher priority in the
resource's minute by minute workday schedule than would most meetings,
appointments, phone calls, etc. As a PM, I'm going to expect my resources
to plan their workday around the work I've assigned them rather than
assigning tasks to them to do when they get around to it and don't otherwise
have anything else on their agenda.