Resource management

[Ashley McKown]

I thank you all very much, all of you are doing awonderful job, mvps are the
bombs
Here is how i am going to bother you all today.

Background
I have a resource pool and bunch of projects linked to it, I open them in a
separate project file, in the new project file I delete them all to begin
with, then I re-insert the ones that I need, problem number one is Is there a
way that I dont have to delete them every time they will do it themselves,
number two is that when i insert projects it seems like that all the new
projects are sub projects or sub tasks of the one before it so if i was to
delete the first project all of them will have to be deleted and not just the
first one.

What I ideally want to do is as i insert new projects MS project should
schedule the resources to it as they are available, going back to my example
if lawn mower is free from 2 - 4 pm on monday and i insert a project on
friday it would schedule the first task of mowing the lawn on monday from 2
-4 pm and then the next task of weed whacking at the first avavilability of
weed whacker. It is not doing that right now infact what it is doing right
now is that in one hour it is giving half an hour to task 1 from one project
and then another half to task 1 from another project. How do i overcome that.

thanking you all in advance

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Ashley,

I'll take up your questions one after the other but because of my utter
surprise I'll start with your final statement.
Because it simply isn't true.
Project does NOT spontanously split a resource over several tasks.
In fact, lots and lots of people complain in this and other Newsgroups that
it SHOULD do so, that they EXPECT it to do so, but it simply does not. NOT
that is.

OK, now let's be positive.

1. How would you tell projects "to delete themselves"?
Concretely, if you have to delete many projects from the master file
generated by opening teh pool with the third ("Pool and Sharers") option
maybe it is better to create a master immediately.
No need to "delete them all" you can start with a new file as well.

2. In order to avoid indenting, always close an inserted project (by
clicking the little minus sign in front of the project summary task) before
inserting one underneath.
And should you have forgotten, you can always outdent a project task the way
you outdent any other task (turquoise arrow pointing left, on your toolbar)

3. Do you have Resource leveling set to automatic? Because if you haven't,
NOTHING will happen to a project's task when you insert an other one (OBTW,
inserting is irrelevant, it's whether or not it is connected to a pool and
open). And by all means, if Leveling is set to automatic, it will only
postpone tasks till when an overallocation is solved - and that might well
be exactly wht you are looking after.

HTH