Resource Scheduling - Best Practice

[Steven Douglass]

Project Pro 2007 | Project Server 2007

My company supports 7.5h work days, so the working time of the base/standard
calender reflects this.

Currently, all project tasks are based off a 7.5h work day. This
unfortunately, is not a realistic situation.

The real-life scenario that I need to acocmodate is that of that 7.5h work
day, 1h is administrative work time for stand-up team meetings, timesheets
submissions, general company duties, napping, etc. The other 6.5h of the work
day is project-related work time. So for a given week, 5h is administrative
work time.

Note: Some resources may use <=> 1h/day on administrative work.

I'm looking to understand what would be considered a Best Practice to handle
this scenario. I'm sure it's a common one.

The known criteria for the solution would be:

+ I don't want to manage a recurring admin task for resources in each
project plan. I can see this being a time-intensive effort for me. I may be
wrong about the effort here because I've never done it this way.

+ Resources should be able to enter their admin and project time via PS2007
timesheets (we're heading down this path VERY quickly)

+ If a resource spent only 2 hours in a given week on admin tasks where 5h
was available, they should have the opportunity to add the other 3 hours of
work against a project task for which they were assigned. As a result,
accelerated progress on project-related tasks would be visible.

What's the recommended/best practice way to handle this scenario with
PPro2007 & PS2007?

To complicate the matter, I have several active projects where 7.5h of each
day is configured as project task work capacity, so I need to change it
mid-project to accomodate 6.5h for project tasks and 1h for admin tasks (for
all resources).

How can I accomplish this?

I am using the Enterprise Resource Pool and Project Pro 2007 Build Team
features for all my projects.

Sorry for the long-winded question(s). Thanks for the help.

 

[ahelp]

I can't vouch for "Best Practice," but what we've used is a separate overhead
project with the admin tasks. Assigning a small unit allocation to each task
in PS2003 using Fixed Units/Effort Driven tasks & Managed Time Periods should
in principle work, but in practice we've seen it drive out finish dates to
2046. Not only that, but the units, don't seem to always stay "fixed". For an
overhead project, that's not necessarily a big issue, but it could
potentially affect future allocation predictions and can bog down the OLAP
cube.

PS2007 seems to offer an ideal solution with being able to attach a Resource
Plan to an overhead/administrative project and control allocation using the
Resource Plan and FTEs. So for your situation you could allocate your
resources at .13 FTE for 1 hour a day. Allocation wise, it would show them as
allocated for that portion of their day, without having to divide it up
between various admin tasks. They could still book whatever work they
actually did on the real projects.

However... in initial testing, the FTE assigned does not correlate with
hours allocated. If you're controlling the admin project, you could
experiment to come up with the FTE that correlates to 1 hour, but if others
are building the admin projects, that might be too much to ask.
Hope this helps...
Mike

 

[Steven Douglass]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your comments. What you propose seems like a lot of overhead for
something that in my opinion is quite common. Realistically, this should be
handled in PPro2007/PS2007 in a much easier fashion. Wishful thinking
perhaps...

I'd like to hear what other Project Managers have done to deal with this
admin/project time split. Anyone else?

 

[Brian K]

In your situation where you have a 7.5 hour work day and then need to
have people only working 6.5 hours on project work you could adjust the
Max Units for such resource to 87% This would mean that an assignment
to a 1 day duration task would give a Work value of 6.53 hours. Not
exact but the margin of error for such planning is not only more than
the .03 hours but likely over .5 as well.


--

 

[Steven Douglass]

Thanks Brian. In my mind this makes sense. I'm going to try this out on a
single project in PS2007 and see how timesheets play into it.

Appreciate it.