Trying Schedule location or vacation for staff

[EnviorToxMan]

I have been trying to get Project 98 to work for me but am having some
problems. Currently the company I just joined uses as spreadsheet for days
in the months to track what field project the staff are on and when they
potentially want vacation. The chart can change on a wim and needs to be
easy to change i.e. change of dates. The process they use now is too much
effort with three people getting in and out of the file. I am sure Project
98 can do this but I am lost because it does not appear to give me what I
want on the resource usage or gantt chart.

Any ideas or other locations to guide me?

 

[davegb]

I have been trying to get Project 98 to work for me but am having some
problems. Currently the company I just joined uses as spreadsheet for days
in the months to track what field project the staff are on and when they
potentially want vacation. The chart can change on a wim and needs to be
easy to change i.e. change of dates. The process they use now is too much
effort with three people getting in and out of the file. I am sure Project
98 can do this but I am lost because it does not appear to give me what I
want on the resource usage or gantt chart.

Any ideas or other locations to guide me?

Project is really not well suited for your application, which is just
tracking personnel availability. It's for tracking projects, primarily
by using the Critical Path Method. It's definitely overkill for you
situation. I'd use Excel, or if you want something more specific to
your needs, I'd Google under "Recsource Tracking software" and
"Personnel Scheduling software" and things like that. I imagine you'll
find something to do pretty much what you want.

 

[EnviorToxMan]

Thanks for the advice. But I am sure that Project could do it. Many of the
people are out in the field on specific tasks that last a period of a week or
so. Because the summer is the busy time for field collection it is important
to keep the staff fully booked throughout and still maintain their holidays
and banked time they get from overtime. Is there not a way of doing this
using tasks and quickly using holidays as a task?

Dan

 

[davegb]

Thanks for the advice. But I am sure that Project could do it. Many of the
people are out in the field on specific tasks that last a period of a week or
so. Because the summer is the busy time for field collection it is important
to keep the staff fully booked throughout and still maintain their holidays
and banked time they get from overtime. Is there not a way of doing this
using tasks and quickly using holidays as a task?

Dan

I'm sure it could be done, but probably with compications you can't
forsee. You could just create a base calendar (with holidays) and a
list of tasks, then assign resources to them, then create resource
calendars to reflect individual resource's availability.
Hope this helps in your world.

 

[Catfish Hunter]

I suggest making a "Summay" task for each person. Set all your resource
calanders to 24 hours and let the task calander dictate when they can work or
go on vacation. For your task you may need to set up some calanders. I would
also use one of the text fields as a code field for each person. You can then
filter to a specific person.
Only one person at a time can be in a project with MS Projects. Primavera
allows multiple users at once. The cost is the problem.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Project is primarily a scheduling tool and secondarliy a tracking tool. You
said "dates can change on a whim..." But Project doesn't isn't a tool to
record dates tat something is scheduled to be done. It is a tool to
calculate when things NEED to be done based on the project's business
objectives. It almost sounds like the field teams or therir supervisors are
doing their own scheduling by the seat of their pants and then either giving
you the dates they're planning on doing something and you want to enter that
into Project, or they're telling you the dates they did something and you're
trying to enter them. But that's not quite Project's role. The idea is a
schedule creation, not tracking, tool that the PM uses to tell the resources
and their supervisors when they should be doing various tasks. The PM tells
them before the fact when the're SUPPOSED to do whatever it is so the
project gets done in the most efficient manner. The tracking part comes in
later, after they've done it and are telling you when they did it and how
long it took. in other words, whether they met your plan or not.