This chapter covers assigning different kinds of resources to tasks in your project.
In Project, the people, things, and money you need to get the tasks in your project done are called resources. By adding resources to your project, you make them available to assign to tasks within your project. Resources can have calendars that are unique to them and can be assigned specific cost information.
Project supports three different types of resources:
• Work resources are the people and equipment that will do the work to complete tasks in your project. For example, a developer for your product is a work resource, and the server he uses to check code is also a work resource.
• Material resources are the things that the work resources need to complete tasks in your project. For example, if one of the work resources for your project is a plotter, you may also want to include material resources for paper and toner. Or, if you’re planning a construction project, you may want to include cement, rebar, lumber, and other supplies for your project as material resources.
• Cost resources are the fees associated with getting tasks in your project done, which aren’t associated with the amount of work put into a project or how long the project lasts. For example, if a task in your project requires a business trip, you would include the airfare and hotel charges as cost resources.
Cost resources are different from the costs incurred by work resources doing work on your project, or the costs incurred as you use material resources (supplies) to get work done. For more information on costs in your project, see Chapter 6, “Accounting for Project Costs.”
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In addition to these three types of resources, keep a couple other considerations in mind when planning your project:
• Will other projects use the same resources as my project? If the resources you’ll be using in your project can also be used in other projects in your organization, and if you are running Project Professional 2010 with Project Server, you can choose to make resources in your project enterprise resources or assign enterprise resources to your project. An enterprise resource is a resource that is included in a list of all resources in your organization (the enterprise resource pool). By assigning resources from the enterprise resource pool, you are able to account for work that your resources are doing on other projects, not just your own. This helps track resource availability and enables you to more accurately plan your project within the broader scope of your organization.
• Do I know exactly who/what will be working on my project? If you know you’ll need a specific kind of resource on your project, such as a developer or a roofer, but you’re not sure exactly who or what will be doing the work (that is, you don’t know which person or which server), you can use generic resources to plan your project. By assigning generic resources, you can identify just how many people or things your project will need, and then you can substitute them later for the specific people, equipment, or other resources that will be doing the work you have laid out in your project plan.
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The process for adding a resource to your project is different, depending on whether you’re adding a resource used only in your project (a local resource) or an enterprise resource available for assignment throughout your organization (Project Professional only).
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To add a local resource to your project, follow these steps:
• Std Rate— Type the standard cost rate for the resource. That is, how much the resource is paid for specific time units, such as an hourly, daily, or yearly rate.
• Ovt Rate— Type the overtime cost rate for the resource. That is, how much the resource is paid for overtime work in specific time units, such as per minute, per hour, or per day.
• Cost/Use— Type a per-use cost for the resource, if applicable. For example, several tasks in your project will use an industrial printer. Each time you use the printer, there is an initial cost-per-use fee of $250 on top of the standard daily rate.
• Accrue at— Choose when the costs will be accrued for the resource. By default, this is set to Prorated, meaning that the costs for this resource will be accrued as work is scheduled and actual work is reported on a task. If you choose Start, costs for the entire task will be accrued at the beginning of a resource’s assignment, based on the scheduled work for the task. If you choose End, costs for the resource’s task assignment will not be accrued until the remaining work for the task is set to 0.
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Here’s how to add an enterprise resource to your project, using Project Professional 2010:
• Field Name— Generic
• Test— Equals
• Values— Yes
An individual resource within your project may use a different calendar from the rest of the organization. For example, one of your project’s resources might be out on vacation for two weeks in the middle of July, or a specific piece of equipment might be available for reservation only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays each week. You can set a resource-specific calendar to accurately represent when that resource is able to work on your project.
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To set a separate calendar for a resource, follow these steps:
• Create new base calendar— Click this option to create a new calendar for the resource, from scratch. Working times will be set to the calendar options from the Project Options dialog box, by default.
• Make a copy of [existing base] calendar— Click this to use an existing base calendar as a starting point for the resource’s calendar. Use the drop-down list to choose which base calendar you want to copy.
After you add resources to your project, the next step is to assign them to tasks within your project.
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You have a few different ways to assign work, material, and cost resources to tasks in your project. The Task Information dialog box provides a convenient location to identify details about the resource assignment, including the assignment owner and what percentage of the resource will be used for the task.
To assign a resource to a task in your project, follow these steps:
Figure 5.1. Click the name of the resource you are assigning in the Resource Name column.
For work resources in your project, you can use the Team Planner view to assign tasks to specific people.
Here are the steps to follow to assign a task to a work resource using the Team Planner view:
If resources in your project already have been assigned to tasks, it’s possible that, at some point, you may need to make changes to those resource assignments. This isn’t terribly complicated when work hasn’t started on a task. Simply go back to the Task Information dialog box and make the necessary changes. This gets more complicated when a resource has started work on a task and the actual work values have been recorded in the project. You can take a few different approaches in this situation, depending on what changed:
• If all work assigned to all resources on the task needs to pause and resume at a later time, you can split the work on the task. This creates a gap between the first part of the task, in which the actual work has been recorded, and the next part of the task, in which the remaining work is scheduled.
• If work assigned to one resource on the task needs to pause and resume at a later time, you can use the Resource Usage view to fine-tune the work schedule for that resource.
• If the remaining work assigned to one resource needs to be reassigned to another resource, you can use the Task Usage view to move the remaining work to that resource.
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By splitting a task, you create a gap between one part of the task and another. This keeps the actual work where it was recorded but enables you to move the remaining work to a later time within the project schedule. When you split a task, all resource assignments for the task are split. If you just want to create a gap in one resource’s schedule for the task, see the next section, “Fine-Tuning a Resource’s Work Schedule for a Task.”
To split work on a task, follow these steps:
Figure 5.3. This task has been split into two portions, with a gap in the middle represented by a dotted line.
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If a resource assigned to your task needs to put work on the task on hold for some reason (maybe to work on a last-minute, higher-priority task, for example), you can use the Resource Usage view to split that resource’s work, without splitting the entire task.
Follow these steps to adjust the task’s work schedule for a single resource:
Figure 5.4. This assignment has actual work reported on Monday and Tuesday, and scheduled work for Wednesday and Thursday.
If a resource has been working on a task and recording actual work, but then is taken off of the task for some reason (poor performance or a job change, for example), you can move the remaining work to another resource.
To reassign the remaining work on a task to another resource, follow these steps:
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