Estimating Resource Requirements

After you determine that you are going to track resources in the project, you still have a few more questions to answer:

  • What kind of resources do you need?

  • How much of each resource do you need?

  • Where will you get the resources?

The following sections will help you answer these questions.

Determining Types of Resources

Resources fall into two categories for use in Project: work resources and material resources. Work resources are the people and equipment assigned to work on a project. These resources complete tasks by expending time (or work) on the task. Material resources, on the other hand, are supplies, stock, or other consumable items used to complete tasks in the project.

 Pro  Project Professional includes a third type of resource, called a generic resource. Generic resources are placeholders, not specific individuals or items. You use generic resources to specify the skills required for an assignment before you know which individual resources are available. They’re entered the same way you enter work and material resources, and they behave much like work resources.

To determine the types of resources you need in the project, review the project scope and task list to see what the project requires. Think about the following questions:

What type of people do you need to complete the tasks? Will individuals be assigned to the project?

Are teams or departments responsible for certain tasks?

Will you be using outside vendors or contractors?

Are there classes of workers (recruiters or programmers, for example) that can be used interchangeably?

What facilities and equipment do you need? Does the project require that you schedule certain facilities, such as a computer lab, conference rooms, or factories?

Will you be scheduling equipment such as servers, computers, presses, backhoes, or other industrial machines?

What consumable materials will you use during the course of the project? Does the project require building products, a special kind of paper, parts to be assembled, or other material goods?

If you are uncertain about the answers to these questions, review the project specifications, consult with others who have completed similar projects, and review old project reports. If similar projects do not exist within your organization, talk with supervisors and other leaders about specific aspects of the project and to hear educated guesses about the types of resources you will need.

Note 

For more about developing a project scope, refer to “What Is a Project?” in Chapter 1.

Mapping Out the Necessary Resource Quantities

After you ascertain the “who” and “what” of the project, you need to consider “how much” of each resource you need. The quantity of resources, in most cases, is directly related to the desired duration of the task. If the task is to send out marketing materials to prospective clients and the task is estimated to take two days, adding resources (a second person) to the project means that it could be completed in one day. If the assigned resource is only available to work on the task four hours a day instead of full time, the task will probably take four days—maybe longer because of the gearing up and gearing down that can be associated with a work period, such as getting all the information out, figuring out where people left off, putting everything away at the end of the time, and so on.

Experience and productivity levels of a resource may also influence the duration of a task. A new or inexperienced employee may take longer just because they don’t know the computer system with which they are working, or they may unfamiliar with the mail merges used to customize the marketing materials.

In other cases, the quantity of available resources has no relationship to the completion of a task. If you need to rent a computer for the staff member to prepare the mailing materials before the rest of the office equipment is moved to the new facility, renting two computers will not generally make the job go any faster for one person. Conversely, if you have only one computer, adding a second person to the task may not impact the duration.

For the purpose of working in Project 2002, it is valuable to think of work resources in terms of time, such as minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, and to think of material resources in terms of units, such as pounds, boxes, cubic feet, tons, and dozens.

Defining Max Units

In Project, work resources are assigned a percentage or number to represent the maximum units the resource has available to the project. If someone is available to work on a project fulltime, for example, they would be assigned a maximum unit of 100%. If they were only assigned to your project on a half-time basis, you would assign them a max unit of 50%. Three full-time programmers with similar skills in Visual Basic provide 300% of a VB Programmer resource.

Tip 

By default, Project measures Max Units in percentage. To instead measure Max Units as a decimal number, choose Tools Ø Options and then select the Schedule tab. In the field Show Assignment Units As A, select Decimal from the drop-down list.

Because the Max Units field is a based on a calendar, the Max Units field is not used for material resources. Material resources are measured in assignment units (for example, tons or tons per day) and are set when the assignment is made. For more about assigning assignment units to tasks, see Chapter 10.

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Mastering Max Units and Resource Calendars

The percentage used in Project’s Max Units field is based on the resource calendar assigned to the resource. If a resource works half-time, you can account for this in two ways: by adjusting the resource’s working time or the resource’s maximum units. The first method is the most descriptive because it reflects a person’s actual schedule. In this method, assuming that all of a resource’s hours are assigned to your project, you would adjust the resource’s calendar to show the resource’s actual part-time schedule. The Max Units field would show 100% because the resource has 100% of their available 20 hours to work in this project. (For more about adjusting the base calendar, see “Defining the Project Calendar” in Chapter 6. For more on setting up custom resource calendars, see “Setting Work Times for Resources” later in this chapter.)

In the second method, adjusting the resource’s maximum units, you change the Max Units field to show the percentage of the Standard (Project) calendar, which is traditionally a 40-hour work week. The resource calendar would reflect a full-time schedule, so the maximum units available for this resource to work on the project would be 50%.

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Using Consolidated Resource Names

If resources are assigned to complete the same types of tasks, and they share the same working calendar and same rates, you can enter them as one resource by using a consolidated resource name rather than listing each one separately. For example, you can enter programmers, movers, Human Resources, or the name of an organization as the Resource name and then assign them an accumulated percentage for Max Units. If, for example, you have three full-time programmers working on a project and you list them as a consolidated resource, the Max Units would be 300%.

Project enables you to use consolidated resource names, and assign different work availability to resources within the group. For example, suppose you have a programmer who is assigned to work on another project for the first two weeks of your project, but will then be available full-time on your project along with the other programmers. You can use the Resource Information dialog box to set availability dates for each resource in the consolidated group. To find out more about this feature called Contoured Resource Availability, see “Entering More Information with the Resource Information Dialog Box” later in this chapter.

Refining Duration Estimates

This point in the project planning is a good time to refine estimates for duration of the tasks. After you have a sense of the resources required, you can adjust task durations to more closely match your newest estimate.

Note 

Entering a ? after a duration represents an estimate. You can filter the task views to show estimated durations; however, all durations are really estimates at this stage of the project. Enter a ? if you want to indicate a level of uncertainty about the estimate.

To change a duration, follow these steps:

  1. Switch to the Gantt Chart view.

  2. Select the cell in the Duration field you want to change.

  3. Click the Up or Down spin-box arrow to the number you want.

  4. Press Enter to accept the changes.

    Tip 

    You can edit directly in a cell by clicking within the cell (or pressing F2) to switch to Edit mode.

Refining the Task List

When you review the task list with resources in mind, you may find that one task really requires two or more different resources. Even though you can assign more than one resource to a task in Project, when you find that a task needs more than one class of resource (for example, a designer and a programmer) this may indicate that the task should be split up into pieces.

If you find a task that you want to split, insert a new task into the task list. To do this, right-click on a task and then choose New Task from the shortcut menu; or click on a task and then choose Insert Ø New Task. The new task is inserted above the selected task.

Obtaining Resources

After you determine the types of resources you need and the approximate quantities, you have to consider where or how you will obtain the resources. Answer these questions to determine where and how you will obtain the resources:

  • If you are using staff within your organization, will they be assigned to the project as individuals or as a class of workers? In other words, will you have to consider each individual’s work schedule and time commitments, or will you be using a worker pool in which all the individuals share a common schedule and work is divided according to availability?

  • Will another department or team be handling certain tasks so that you don’t have to delineate specific people in the resource list?

  • Will you be contracting with external workers for some of the tasks? If so, will you pay them by the hour or on a flat-fee basis? If you are paying them a flat fee, you may be able to identify them as a material resource because you are not concerned about the amount of work it takes them to complete the assigned tasks.

  • Does your organization own the equipment and facilities you need, or do they need to be purchased, rented, or leased?

  • How and from where will you obtain other material resources? Will they be delivered, or does one of your resources have to pick them up? If you’re responsible, you may want to account for the time involved in the pickup and delivery of the materials resources.

Preparing to Enter Resource Information into Your Project

After you determine what kinds of resources you need, how much of each resource you need, and where you will obtain your resources, you are now ready to begin creating a draft resource list for your project. You can enter resources into your project in three ways:

  • Create a resource list within your project.

  • Share the resource list created in another project.

  • Share resources with other projects from a resource pool.

 Server  A shared resource pool is a master list of resources that is shared among multiple projects in an organization. By using a resource pool, you can schedule work resources across projects while tracking conflicts, over and under allocations and availability.

 Pro  If you’re using Project Professional with Project Server, you have the option of selecting resources from a companywide enterprise resource pool. See Chapter 21 for details.

Tip 

Don’t assume that resource pools are used only in large organizations with pools of employees. Small companies that have to closely coordinate staff assigned to a variety of projects often use resource pools to communicate information about staff usage between projects.

The rest of this chapter focuses on creating and using a resource list within a project. You can find out more about sharing the resource list created in another project, and creating and accessing a shared resource pool, in Chapter 15.



Mastering Microsoft Project 2002
Mastering Microsoft Project 2002
ISBN: 0782141471
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 241

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