It’s not uncommon, as you begin a project, to find that you don’t know exactly who or what resource you need to complete a task, but that you can describe the skills or features the resource needs. In this case, you can define generic resources and use them as placeholders until the time when you need the real deal. For "people" resources (called work resources in Project), this approach works particularly well if your Human Resources department has job descriptions for each of the resources you might want to assign to your project.

When you define generic resources, make sure they’re truly generic. Give them names, such as "Programmer" or "Lead Designer" or "Project Assistant," that describe the job they do rather than who they are. In the case of "non-human" generic resources, use names such as "Meeting Room" instead of "4th Floor Conference Room."

The generic resource feature was designed primarily for use with Project Professional and Project Server. You can create generic resources and then use the Resource Substitution Wizard to replace generic resources with actual resources stored in Project Server. Although Project Standard and Project Professional alone don’t have any built-in mechanism to substitute resources, those of you who don’t use Project Server might still find this use of generic resources helpful. For example, you can use generic resources when you don’t care who does the work and you simply want to track the work that is completed on a project. Or you might use generic resources as you start a project and then identify for your Human Resources department that you need three engineers at a particular point in time.

You can identify a generic resource by selecting the Generic check box in the Resource Information dialog box, which is shown in 1-11. You open this dialog box by displaying any resource-oriented view and double-clicking the resource that you want to make generic.

Figure 1-11. Select the Generic check box to designate a generic resource.

When you click OK, project displays the icon you see in the margin beside the row number of the generic resource when you view the Resource Sheet.