Chapter 6. Setting Up Resources in the Project

As soon as you’re assigned as manager of the project, you might have certain resources in mind whom you know would be right for the project. As the scope becomes more defined and as you develop the task list along with the milestones and deliverables, you’re likely to have even more ideas. If you have specific people in mind, you might start inquiring about their availability. You might also start investigating sources, specifications, and prices for material and equipment. You’re likely to have a particular budget, and you might start thinking about the kinds of costs the tasks in your project are likely to incur.

By the time you develop the durations of the tasks, you have very concrete information in front of you—you now know exactly which tasks need to be done and what kinds of resources you need to do them.

There might be a team in place already—the full-time members of a department who are waiting to sink their teeth into a good project. There might be no team at all, and you’ll have to hire some people, borrow some from another group, and contract others. Or you might have a core staff, but for this project you’ll need to contract additional temporary workers to fill out the skills needed for the team.

You can add the names of resources who will be working on this project as you acquire them. These might be the names of actual people. Or they might be generic resource names that describe the skills and competencies needed to fulfill the task. Where applicable, you can enter the names of equipment or material resources that will also help implement the project. You can specify cost resources such as equipment rentals or travel fares. You can enter additional resource information, such as work schedule, availability, cost, and notes.

How Many Resources Do You Need?

Although you know the tasks that need to be done and the kinds of resources you need to be able to do them, you might not know how many of a particular type of resource you need just yet.

Here’s the process: First, identify the tasks that need to be done. Second, identify the resources needed to do those tasks. Third, assign resources to the tasks. At that point, you can see whether the resulting schedule meets your target date or target budget.

You need to have tasks in place to find out how many resources you need. You also need resources to assign to those tasks to create an accurate schedule and cost estimate. After assigning resources, if the schedule calculates a finish date later than the target finish date, you might have to go back and add more resources to your team. Or if the project costs are over budget and you haven’t even started work yet, you might have to forego additional resources or scramble to replace expensive resources with less expensive ones.

As you can see, tuning your project plan to get the right number of resources to meet your schedule, costs, and workload requirements is an iterative process. You might need to go through several cycles of refinement before you arrive at the perfect plan.

Note

For more information about refining the project plan to meet a target date or budget, see Chapter 9.

Understanding the Impact of Resources in the Project Plan

Resources carry out the work of your project or model the expenditure of costs or consumption of materials. However, with your tasks defined and scheduled, why is it necessary to actually specify resources in your project plan? You could just print the schedule and tell people which tasks they’re responsible for: Here are your due dates; now go make them happen.

This approach might seem like a simple way of managing a project, but if you do it this way, you’ll miss out on the tremendous scheduling, tracking, and communication capabilities provided by Microsoft Office Project 2007. By adding resources to your project, you can do the following:

  1. Increase the accuracy of your schedule. Office Project 2007 already takes into account the project calendar, durations, task dependencies, and constraints to build an accurate model of your project. When you assign resources, Microsoft Project takes this schedule a significant step further by adding the working times and availability of your resources into the scheduling calculations.

  2. Know ahead of time whether any resources are overloaded with too much work in the allotted time. You can also see whether anyone is underallocated and shift responsibilities accordingly as you refine your schedule. Later, when work is being done and you’re getting progress information on each task, you can find bottlenecks or any new overallocations or underallocations due to shifts in the schedule.

  3. Track progress according to resource work. Your resources can tell you how much time they’ve spent on their tasks for a given week and how much more time they will need. This tracking can help you make any necessary adjustments to keep the project moving in the right direction. Recording actual progress data also captures historical information that will be invaluable for future projects.

  4. Record the use, cost, and consumption of materials in your project. These details can help you monitor your budget performance as well as give you advance notice as to when you need to reorder supplies.

  5. Establish the means for tracking some of the largest costs in the project, including those costs for labor, equipment, materials, travel, rentals, software, and so on.

  6. Exchange task assignments, task updates, progress information, and status reports with your resources, via Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access.

  7. Make sure that all tasks are assigned to a responsible and accountable resource so nothing inadvertently slips through the cracks to be forgotten until it’s too late.

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