Resource Planning with Microsoft Project

hello everyone and welcome to this video on resource planning as you can see in my schedule now we've already set up our tasks we've estimated durations and work effort we've linked the tasks together we've modded some model modeled some dependencies between them in terms of some of them are start start relationships we have some negative lags and positive lags and percentage lags so pretty much I'm going to assume that my project is all set up and we're ready to now start our project okay to do this you could if you had a project online environment or a project server environment you could start building your team from the enterprise at this point so you know if you are using that you'll understand what I mean if you're not using project online project server you're not able to build your team from enterprise ok but if you had can build your team from enterprise what you're actually doing at that point is going up to your project server environment and saying hey give me all the resources in the organization that are shared across all the different projects so that I can use the ones that I want for this project that'll save you the effort of typing in the names setting up the resources setting their raid setting that calendars it's all done for you and Evan the benefits of that is you're taking from a shared resource pool so you can see if somebody is working on another project well perhaps they're not available to work on your project kind of thing so gives you that visibility of where your resources are across all projects but we're not using that we're just using Microsoft Project standalone so for this reason I'm going to click on the view ribbon and then click on the resource sheet view within the resource views section the view ribbon and you can see here I've actually created two resources already Tom Henry and an electrical contractor so I want to add some additional resources you have to do this I'm going to add here Mike Jones I'm just going to type just like we do in the task names in the resource names I'm going to type in Mike Jones okay and by default here is a work resource okay if you rember back to the presentation on the three different types work material and cost we can see those ones here by default it's a twerk resource you can also see in the standard rate column we have zero the standard rate is that resources hourly rate so I'm going to give this person $60 per hour I've done the same thing for Tom Henry and the same thing for the electrical contractor however the electrical contractors come back to me and said hey just to let you know I charge a call out there every time you need me on on your project no you have to pay me thirty-five dollars callout fee all right so the cost per use column is great for modeling this every time you use something there's a cost involved for a task okay so based on the task we can also see here we have the calendar for the resource standard not going to adjust that okay it's at another type of resource now if you remember back then the three types we're going to add another type so for this one I'm going to say software and the clever ones of you out there you'll probably think yeah he's going to go for a cost resource okay cost resources model fixed costs within our project so I want to give this one a standard rate you gave me typing there you can't give it a standard rate when you assign the cost resource at that point you can apply a cost because you know you don't know how much you spend on software just yet maybe you get the invoice then you can add that to the project or perhaps you have estimated costs well you don't know what they are just yet at this point when you actually come to model this you'll add the resource to a task and at that moment in time you'll specify the cost so the only other field available here is the prorated what this means is let's say and this is a good actually for software are you going to be invoiced at the start as soon as you use it quite likely or do you have to pay for at the end of the project or do you want to schedule that cost of source out over the duration of the task that it's working on so you know if your kids are pay for it the very start you can put it at the start in terms of pay for it at the end you can see accrue it at the end for cost resources it's kind of a case-by-case basis you know if you usually I'd say you're going to get charged Spri the beginning because you have to install the software and you're to pay for it so that'd be a good example of we would accrue that at the start of the task the Tom Henry and the electrical contractor and Mike Jones they're probably going to be prorated you know we want to say you know as they work on the task you know if they're two weeks into a four week task you know we've spent half the money so we want to do that prorated and it will tell us how much we spent for a given date and moment in time alright so that was software let's do one law then so bricks materials okay so remember the materials are used material resources are used to model kind of real things that we're going to be using on our project for example if we've got a construction project we're building a house we need some bricks we need to capture how we're going to measure that so let's say in the real world you know oh we're gonna buy some bricks well do you buy them by the pallet by the actual brick or how you buying them and how you invoiced that's how I would think about it so I'm usually advised by the pallet so the material label is the unit by which you're measuring how many of these you've used and we can give it a standard rate how much is a pallet of bricks right so I'm going to say that standard pallet bricks is 250 dollars so much they challenge me so if I used two pallets it's going to cost me 520 pallets so on and so forth okay that's it at this point I'm actually gonna save my project later or not I like to save and save often and now I'm going to go back to my Gantt chart view so from the view ribbon and the click Gantt chart so what assigning resources the first thing you need to do is create your resource pool and that can be done by using the enterprise resource pool or creating your own from scratch either way that needs to be done first now I have the ability to assign resources to my project if you remember back to the presentation I showed you it in my opinion one of the best ways for getting detailed but there are other ways that are equally valuable okay I'm going to show you three ways of assigning resources to your project okay so the first one I'm going to show you is actually just using the resource names column I can come in here and I can say Tom Henry ah that's great because I already had Tom Henry and it recognized it but what if I was to delete that guy out and put Thomas Henry well what happened there Thomas Henry well what happened was because I typed a name in it added that person to the resource pool and not only that that person is free it's no standard rate and you know I've made a mistake some people call me Thomas some people call me Tom you know so important step here if you remember back to the project options in the schedule and the advanced there's this checkbox that I told you to uncheck as a recommended option I came in here and checked it again okay uncheck it and we're going to try that again okay this time I'm going to put Michael Jones oh yes now what this is doing is this give me a prompt is saying hey the results you type is not in the resource board you want to add this person wait a minute I already added that was the first thing I did because I remembered Tom Henry's steps on adding resources the first thing we do is we build our resource pool in the resource sheet or from the enterprise resource pool and then we assign them oh okay so what's going on here well basically because you've typed a name it doesn't recognize that as a member of the resource pool currently it's prompting you that's that option that we just set so really important option because it's going to remind you and you're not going to have mistakes so I'm going to say no I don't add that person the best practice here is to click on the drop-down and say Mike Jonas so don't type names into the resource names column click on the drop-down and select like son now what you're probably noticing here is you're seeing percentages next to the resource names and for a lot of people they're not going to have seen that before the reason we're seeing percentages is because we have estimated the work effort for the task if you have if you estimate the work effort Microsoft Project has got three of the variables that we spoke about in the presentation it's got the duration is for the work so it can calculate the third which in this case is the percent units now if we didn't calculate the work it would take the default of 100 percent units and calculate the work for us so in this case I'm going to say right I'm going to assign Thomas Henry here and we're going to see Oh Thomas Henry still in my resource pool that's dangerous I need to delete him out Tom Henry's the one I wanted 50 percent Mike's a project look to the duration and look to the work and calculated the units for this exact same scenario down here the task ten where I have not estimated the work it's a one-day duration as I assign Tom Henry it's going to assume a hundred percent units and calculate the work at eight hours so that's another benefit of calculating the work out but it will allocate percentages for your resources so yeah you can see how by having extra resources and that was a genuine mistake on my part got to remove Thomas Henry by having extra resources in your resourceful it can confuse things and you can really mess it up because you've got different the same resort of different names in different allocations you're going to see where they're over allocated and things like that all right so that's one way using the resource names column another way and another method that I particularly like actually is highlighting a selection of tasks like so and I want to add the same resource to all of them well I don't want to come into the resource names column click on the drop-down and select the name for each one so a better way to do that is to select the tasks like so and in new resource ribbon I'm going to click on the assign resources in here I can select the name that I want in this case is going to be Tom Henry and assign him to all three tasks you can see Tom Henry Tom Henry and Tom Henry I could have also assigned multiple let's undo that okay assign resources I could have assigned Mike and Tom oops there Mike sign here and we'll also assign Tom to all three tasks and close so the assign resources dialog is great for assigning multiple to multiple multiple to one or one to multiple okay fine eat little tool there all right one other thing I wanted to is for example let's pull my Gantt chart over here okay so we have these two tasks here to our six anti seven going on side by side I want to assign somebody to do the same tasks but they kind of got to manage their own time right because there's two jobs to do at the same time in this case I mean I need to adjust assignment planning variables to do this I'm going to click on the View ribbon and I'm going to bring up that details area so here we have the task form saying here it says task 4 if it doesn't say task form you can click on the drop down here and select task 4 and you will see that make sure it says task form here in addition right click and make sure it says resources and predecessors that's this particular form if you have ever selected a different one like work looks different the resources and predecessors is my favorite in here you can see the duration units the work the task type and whether it's effort driven or not and manually scheduled or not some of you will like the task details form I think that's a little bit too much for me this gives me everything I need so to just use the task form with the resources and predecessors table all right so let's have a play with this now so task 1 I'm going to assign it's a 3 a task no work to be done right now but as soon as I assign a resource tal memory here I want to assign him to do that job but only work part-time four hours a day 50% so we're going to click on the units and say 50% please so three days 50% when I press ok Mike sub-project calculates the work for me giving it two variables it calculates the third I gave it the duration I gave it the assignment units it calculates out how much work can be done given the units within that duration pretty smart all right next one I'm going to scroll down a little bit yeah and for task 6 I want to assign somebody it's going to be Mike this time it's an eight-day task but I want him to work full-time no actually I wanted to work within the eight-day task just that sir it should be 80 hours that say he only got to do 40 hours not going to specify the units but look we've already specified the work for the task so it's a sign Mike at 78% so what gave misc scenario was the duration also we originally calculated 50 it's gone down to 40 that's because we've a signer is also things are we know better now so be careful always be careful check you'll change highlighting so at this point I'd say right what did I want well I wanted an 8 day task but with 50 hours work that's what I wanted it was 8 days but there's only 50 hours at work to be done in scenarios like this we need to adjust the task type to be fixed duration so if you remember there's three variables well there's always a pivotal point okay at the moment it was fixed units but now I'm making the duration the pivotal point so if I put the duration up to eight days now press ok that should work eight days goes back to 50 hours but I see that that's exactly what I wanted okay and recalculate it that's great but at this point now with it being fixed duration that duration is now set because I've set it I can decrease will increase the duration I sorry the work like so and the duration will remain the same it will not change so I actually personally recommend fix units as a default and then if you need to make a task fixed duration come in here and fix it alright task 7 another one I need to staff alright for this one I'm going to assign Tom Henry press ok now it's calculated out the duration at 24 hours however I need some need to help tom emmer this and when I ask them to help I want Tom Henry to offload 12 hours of his 24 on to that person to do that I need to use the effort driven checkbox click the average of in checkbox what this does at that moment in time is hold the work for the task 24 hours constant it's locked it ok and now I when I assign a second resource Mike Jones I press ok the work for the task stays the same but their work is split across the two resources twelve and twelve just as we wanted so that's what the effort driven checkbox would do let's come back and undo that and see what happens if I didn't check the effort driven checkbox who work for the task of 24 hours we have not locked it and add Mike Jones this time non effort driven well Mike Joan gets another 24 hours so it's as if you're putting additional resources on that task because there's more work to be done so you can see that the difference between effort driven and non-driven if a task is effort driven the work is split across the resources working on it if it is non effort driven every time you add a new resource they also are working full-time or whatever time they're working on that project and the work is not split it's added on or tacked on excuse me all right so let's scroll down the page a little bit and we can see task 8 all right I'm going to come in here and I'm going to assign Tom Henry to this one we haven't specified the work the duration is 7 days press ok and we can see Tom Henry is calculated to work 100% units by default and he has 56 hours of work really easy ok what I want to show you now if we come up this page is how to assign a cost resource now I recommend a best practice is to assign a cost resource to the summary task don't you mind you can see I haven't assigned any work resources to the summary task because that would be a big no-no theoretically behind the scenes when you assign a resource to a summary task like so and while Tom enter into a summary task he's also assigned to every other task again even if he's already assigned so you can see on task 1 and task 2 i'm over-allocated now because I'm working on it twice at the same time so yeah it's a big no-no don't do it what I do recommend however is you should assign cost resources to the summary tasks so for my software here I could add that one it's dead now it doesn't like that ok because you know this is at no cost resort so going to delete that one out and press ok the correct way to assign a cost resource well one way to do it is to click on the task click assign resources in this dialog I'm gonna get my software click assign and the cost I'm going to say right well this software for this phase is going to cost me $5,000 and we're good and close this dollar for Phase two I want to do the exactly the same thing this time I'm gonna do it slightly differently software and put the cost in here for surveys - it's going to be $3,000 and click a sign and we're good $3,000 for the software so we can see for each summary task we now have fixed costs you could roll it all up the project summary or you could roll it all up to the individual phases it's up to you okay the next thing I want to do is add my bricks so I'm going to say that in task sets we're going to use some bricks let me go for assign resources again and in here I'm gonna say bricks assign one pallet okay I can up the number of pallets let's say it's going to be three pallets you can see how the cost is adjusted accordingly pretty cool so that material label is very key here because it's telling us the units by what you're measuring how many of these were using three pallet publisher to put with a parenthesis in an S in there but you have the idea all right that's pretty much it for assigning resources so we've looked at in quite great detail we've looked at how to assign work resources material resources cost resources we looked at the asylum planning variables in terms of assigning people with a fixed number of generate a fixed number of hours fixing the duration so that we can adjust the durations and keep a limited number of hours within a duration we looked at effort driven and we looked at task types so I didn't go into too much detail on those things but I think I've given you enough for this level to kind of go in and understand how to assign resources in a variety of ways so to recap what I'm using the resource names column it's just if I want to do something quick and do now you will notice whenever you use that resource names column there is a drawback when you assign somebody they are assigned full-time so bias unlike full-time you can't adjust it at this point you don't get any control over the assignment planning variables at this point unfortunately so if you want to get into the details I recommend that you use the task form and get into the finite details of that assignment if you want to assign multiple people to multiple tasks you can use the assign resources dialog that's another great one yeah I also recommend that you use that for assigning cost resources as well as material resources but you can use the tasks form for the material resources as well okay that's it thank you very much for watching this video and please continue to watch this series it's been a pleasure thank you

Channel: Tom Henry

Views: 153,965

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: Resource planning, microsoft project, resources in microsoft, assigning resources in microsoft project, resource management in microsoft project, MS Project, Project Online

Id: h7iXdHZOcEs

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2016