Resources on Many Projects

[MarcusLesser]

I'm a long time but basic MSP project user and I havn't really used resources
before. My task is:

'Find a way to plan and apportion resources over projects' - ie apportion
members of my team to projects on a time basis. I do not for the moment want
to go to the lenghth of assigning resources to individual tasks.

Before putting in a lot of effort I want to find examples of best practice
and see if MSP really is the best tool. Do any of you use MSP in this way
and have you any general advice to pass on. One issue that springs to mind
is how this plan would interlink with individual project plans. I suppose it
would be possible to time them all together in some giant programme - do any
of you do this? My immedeate task, to reitterate, is just to plan my
people's time (there's about two dozen). If I involve individual project
plans these all involve other staff from other departments and I don't want
to get involved with planning everything for my 17,000 strong company.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,

Marcus

 

[andrewandrew]

Resource management all takes place on the task level--if you want to balance
resource load between projects, then you'll want to make a high-level project
file independent of your other projects, and assign resources to the
individual tasks on this high-level project.

Alternatively you can assign resources to summary tasks--you may even be
able to do this for summary tasks that represent inserted projects. This is
complicated.

If you already plan these projects in MSP, it might be worth your while to
use it in the complicated way described. My experience with MSP has been to
AVOID complicated links between projects, master projects, and things like
that. Even if you get it to work, if something changes two weeks after you
set it up, it'll be a pain to remember how you set it up. Unless you have
someone working with MSP ~4hrs a day EVERY DAY, you should come up with a
simple solution, even if it requires more manual processing.

If you're super gung-ho for a complex interlinked project, you should
DEFINITELY go for MSP Server. Deployment of that is a job, >$1,000 and
probably much more than that.

A