EPM, Microsoft Project and You

This article, written by Collin Quiring, first appeared in Wellington Project Management newsletter in December  2011. (http://www.projectserver2010.co.uk/2011/11/08/resource-management-with-project-server-2010/)

Last time we started this two-part article by asking some questions about resource management that might be on your mind.  We focused on six questions.  They were:

• ·         Who is working on what projects?
• ·         What tasks are they doing on those projects?
• ·         When are they doing those tasks?
• ·         How many hours of work are assigned for those tasks?
• ·         What is the capacity of each person?
• ·         Who is scheduled to their capacity, over-capacity or dramatically over-capacity?

We also focused on how to see all the resources assigned to one project and then seeing how one resource can see their information.  Our goal in this article is to see how Project Server 2010 allows us to see the information for a resource assigned to many different projects and to see all the resources from the perspective of a schedule or multiple schedules.

In Part One, we looked at our resource, Shelly Smith, for a time period where she was assigned to one schedule.  Now, we need to look at a time period where Shelly is assigned to many different schedules.  Since the picture view might be more easily understood, we will review that one first.  The black line represents Shelly’s capacity – at 40 hours a week.  The blue bar represents the amount of work assigned.  We can easily see that she is way over capacity! 

Now we can review which projects are causing these problems by reviewing the data view.  (We review this in image form at the end of this article.)  We can see that she is over capacity by between 24 and 104 hours for January.  Be able to review this information allows you to go to the various Resource Managers or Project Managers (or the resource) and discuss what the priorities are and what tasks can be moved to other resources or other time periods.  From this chart, we can determine that the Resource Managers for both the “Infrastructure Plan” and the “Residential Construction” schedules think they have 100% of Shelly’s time for the week of 1/9/12.

If one of the potential results of seeing a view like this is to determine if we can move work to other resources we need to be able to see those resources for the same time period.  We can look at each resource individually as we have done or we can see all the resources that we want to during this time period.  For this example, I have chosen to include two more resources, Ryan and Jessica.  I now have a new black line that represents the capacity of all three individuals and I can see the work assigned for the three of them combined.  Note that Shelly is now the yellow and that Ryan is green but Jessica is Blue and she is seriously UNDER capacity.  In one quick look we know who can get some of Shelly’s work.  And, we have also discovered that Ryan is over capacity.

These last few images were from the resource’s perspective but we can also view the work from the schedule perspective.  Earlier, while we were concentrating on Shelly, we looked at which projects were assigning her the most work.  But, we can view how many hours of work are being assigned to resources based on the perspective of projects.

In this chart we are still only looking at three resources but this time by project – that is why the black line representing capacity is still at 120 hours a week (40 hours each per week).  But on the right hand side the names of the projects are all color coded.  Just by reviewing the chart we can determine that the “Commercial Construction” project is taking the most time for the most weeks.

There is another really positive aspect to all of this – it is in real time.  If you are looking at this chart and a Project Manager changes the dates on a schedule and then published that schedule, as soon as you hit refresh the data changes!  Also, you can deselect projects or resources or change the date range and hit the “Apply” button and the graph changes to your new parameters.

These examples just touch on the amount of information that Project Server 2010 can provide.  There are numerous other views and reports and ways to get data that is meaningful to your specific situation.

I am excited about being one of the presenters at the Microsoft Project Conference 2012 in Phoenix, Arizona.  My topic is going to be “Resource Management – Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together!”.  I will be talking about some of the settings that interact together to make the Resource Management piece of Microsoft Project work effectively.

This is the premiere Microsoft-led event for Microsoft Project. To quote Microsoft: “Get more out of your Project 2010 investment by attending this special event for the worldwide Microsoft Project Community Attended by a world-wide audience of project professionals, business and technical decision makers and the Microsoft Project team this unique point-in-time event is your opportunity to learn, network and get more out of you Project 2010 investment!”

For more about the conference and to sign up, go to this website:

http://www.msprojectconference.com/pages/default.aspx

This article, written by Collin Quiring, first appeared in Wellington Project Management newsletter on November 8, 2011.  (http://www.projectserver2010.co.uk/2011/11/08/resource-management-with-project-server-2010-part-12/)

There are many questions about resource management that probably keep you awake all night.  Ok, maybe you can sleep just fine, but perhaps there are questions that perplex you during the day.  There might be dozens of questions that you have but here is a small sample that you (or maybe management) might be wondering about.

• Who is working on what projects?
• What tasks are they doing on those projects?
• When are they doing those tasks?
• How many hours of work are assigned for those tasks?
• What is the capacity of each person?
• Who is scheduled to their capacity, over-capacity or dramatically over-capacity?

Of course, the way to get the answer to each of these is very simple.  All you have to do is walk around, talk to each person individually and ask them.  You can write their answers down (assuming they all tell you the correct information) and then combine your notes and it will be totally valid!  And, when management surprise you with a request for this information for a meeting they are having in a few hours you just have to walk around faster.

Or, maybe there is an easier way!  An easier method would be to click on a link and get a report that gives you the answer to one or more of those questions.  Just think of all the walking time that you will save!

Project Server 2010 can provide you this information quite easily.  To get this information doesn’t require meticulous hours spent entering every possible detail from the first day you start using Project Server.  At some point in the future you may want to add more detail, like skill sets, but it is easy to start gaining valuable information right away with Project Server 2010. (Even if you don’t use Project Server, it is possible to use Project Professional to get this information.  I won’t go into more detail here about how you can get this information without Project Server but it is covered in my new book “Mastering Resource Management Using Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010”.)

Let’s briefly look at the first three questions – ‘Who is working on what projects?’ ‘What tasks are they doing on those projects?’ and ‘When are they doing those tasks?’.  The easiest way to obtain this information is to assign a Resource to each task on your projects (when applicable) and provide a Start Date and Finish Date for those tasks.  This action will give us the ability to see in one combined report who is working on which tasks, on which projects, and when they are working on them.  You can see this information from the Resource’s perspective or by Project.  For example, this screenshot shows how this might look when viewing a single Project:

The view shows us that Shelly Smith is one of the Resources assigned tasks.  Now let’s look at the information from the perspective of Shelly Smith for this same time period as the screenshot above.  When we dive into the information for one single resource we will also get the information that answers the others questions posed at the beginning of this article.  How many hours are assigned?  What is the resources capacity?  And, who is over capacity?  For Shelly Smith, for the time period as shown in the screenshot above from the project perspective, we can see that she normally has a capacity of 40 hours a week.  And, based on her current assignments, she has work assigned to her of about 40 hours per week.  There are two exceptions in this data – the first and last weeks of this time period.  During the week of 11/1/2011 she is assigned 64 hours on the schedule called “Sample” and with a capacity of 32 hours, she is 32 hours OVER capacity.  The week of 12/26/2011 she is 36 hours over capacity.

Sometimes, pictures are worth a 1000 points of data in a grid.  Here is that same information represented in a graph.  The black line represents Shelly’s weekly capacity and the blue bars represent the amount of work assigned to her for that week.

You might be thinking that this is nice for ONE resource and ONE project but when you walk around and ask resources what they are assigned to now they have multiple assignments on multiple projects and it overlaps.  No problem!  Stay tuned for next month’s installment when we show how this information rolls together from multiple projects for multiple resources.

NOTE:  The information provided by these views depends upon some of the business decisions and corresponding setup of Project Server.  These examples are using the Standard Calendar and Fixed Duration tasks.  You can get more detailed information by using different calendars and different task types.  Even if you are using Fixed Duration for task assignments, you can still get a useful perspective of the amount of work being assigned to a Resource!   (For a deeper explanation of task types see http://pmpspecialists.com/WhitePapers/PMP_Specialists_Task_Types.pdf )

BY: Collin Quiring

I know that I haven’t blogged as much lately.  The reason is simple – I have been busy getting ready for a few different large presetnations.  One of them is for Microsoft Project User Group – MPUG – that is a public event on April 28.  Just go to www.mpug.com and look for the “Upcoming MPUG WebNLearns” section on the right hand side.  Here are the details about the upcoming presentation.