Using the Resource Availability Table to set up a team resource

[Joe]

I am trying to use the Resource Availability table to set up a team of 8
people by setting the team (Developers) with 800% max allocation. According
to MSP-2003 help, I should be able to do this. Help says:

"For example, you have a resource named Engineers, representing three
individual engineers on your team. You can enter the maximum units for
Engineers as 300 percent. You can schedule all three engineers for full-time
work at one time without the Engineers resource being overallocated"

But when I assign this team to a task (for high level planning purposes) to
see how long the task will take to complete, it does not set the duration as
I expected, it kept the duration as if it was only 1 resource working at 100%
a not 8 resources at 100%. What am I missing.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Joe,

When you assign a resoruce to a task the first time (or rather, the first
resource) the task will react as a "fixed duration" task.
Project assumes you had the number of resoruces in mind when you set
duration in the first place...
When you MODIFY the units of resource, and the task type (Task Information,
Advanced) is either fixed work or fixed units, duration will adapt.
So when you just enter engineers as a resource, then change that to
Engineers [300%], duratioon will be divided by three.
HTH