What is best way of setting up part-time resources?

[Briony M]

AFAIK there seem to be 2 different ways of setting up a resource as part time.

1. is in their personal callendar to set the days or hours they work.
e.g. highlight all thurs and frid as nonworking time for a 3 day week

2. the other is in the resource information box, General tab to set their
availability, e.g. 60% fora 3 day week.

There seem to be pros and cons for each method:
e.g. the second would account for bank holidays correctly (i.e. they would
only get a pro-rata time off for bank holidays) but seems it would be
confusing if they book days off.
The first method (which I have started using) is ok, but if you only want
the resource to work 1 day during a 1 week duration task, instead of setting
the units to 20% as you would usually, you have to set it to 33% (i.e. 33% of
their 3 day week).

Does anyone else have an opinion on which method is more effective?

Many thanks
Briony

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

I always recommend to take the "days off" method, but then again I also
recommend my clients to only use 100% assignments!
(A guy who has an 8 hr task to do in a 3 day week has a task of 1d duration
and 2 days slack, not 3 days duration. Also see theory of constraints why
this is better management practice)

HTH

 

[JulieD]

Hi

I agree with Jan ...

for me it comes down to what i meant when i set the duration of the task ...

if i have a resource at .6 (or 60%) in the max units column and i assign him
to a 40hr task then project will assign only 24hrs of work ... which means
when i set the duration i would have to have known that i was going to
assign this person and "bumped up" the duration to get the amount of work
that i needed.

whereas if i mark a resources's calendar so they are only three days a week
and assign them to a 40hr task, Project gives them 40hrs of work and adjust
the period of time for them to accomplish this amount of work in ... this
makes more sense to me.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

I agree with Julie as well, with an additional thought. If you have a
part-time employee who is available for, say, 50% of the work week defined
for full-timers and you use the method of setting his max avail to 50%,
you've correctly shown how many hours he's there but you haven't shown WHICH
hours he's there. Is his 20 hours Mon, Tue, and half of Wed, M-F 8-12, M-F
1-5, or someting totally different? And to schedule tasks, so you can say
the widget waxing will start on Monday at xx hour and end on such and such a
date at YY hour, you have to know not only how much work the resource does
during a week but exactly when he does it as well. That means I suggest for
part-timers that you create a calendar that shows hours of work as their
actual assigned shift and set the availability to 100%. If Joe work 4 hours
a day every afternoon, 100% represents his entire work day and he'll get 4
man-hours of work done each day. If he's assigned a task that's 2 hours
long at 100%, he'll get 2 man-hours of work done. If you assigned him to
that same 2 hour task at 50% using the other way of doing part-timers by
reducing their availability, he'll only do 1 man-hour of work which doesn't
seem like a normal description of reality.