Setting Up Resources in Microsoft Project 2010

  • 6/2/2010
Contents
Microsoft Project 2010 supports three types of resources. These are work resources, as well as two special-purpose resources: cost and material. In this chapter from Microsoft Project 2010 Step by Step, you will set up work and cost resources.

Chapter at a Glance

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In this chapter, you will learn how to:

  • Set up basic resource information for the people who work on projects.

  • Adjust the maximum capacity of a resource to do work.

  • Set up cost information for work resources.

  • Change a resource’s availability for work.

  • Enter cost resource information for financial tracking.

  • Record additional information about a resource in a note.

Microsoft Project 2010 supports three types of resources. These are work resources, as well as two special-purpose resources: cost and material. Briefly, here is how to think about the three resource types:

  • Work resources include the people and equipment needed to complete the tasks in a project.

  • Cost resources represent a financial cost associated with a task that you need to account for. Examples include categories of expenses like travel, entertainment, and so on.

  • Material resources are consumables that you use up as the project proceeds. For example, a construction project might need to track steel or concrete as it is used throughout the project.

In this chapter you will set up work and cost resources. Material resources are described in Chapter 8, “Fine-Tuning Resource Details.”

In this chapter, you will set up the work and cost resources that you need to complete the new book launch at Lucerne Publishing. Effective resource management is one of the most powerful advantages of using Project instead of task-focused planning tools, such as paper-based organizers. You do not need to set up resources and assign them to tasks in Project; however, without this information, you might be less effective in managing your schedule. Setting up resource information in Project takes a little effort, but the time is well spent if your project is primarily driven by time or cost constraints (and nearly all projects are driven by one, if not both, of these factors).

Practice Files

Before you can complete the exercises in this chapter, you need to copy the book’s practice files to your computer. A complete list of practice files is provided in “Using the Practice Files” at the beginning of this book. For each exercise that has a practice file, simply browse to where you saved the book’s practice file folder.

Important

If you are running Project Professional, you may need to make a one-time setting change. This helps ensure that the practice files you work with in this chapter do not affect your Project Server data. For more information, see Appendix C, “Using the Practice Files if Connected to Project Server.”

Setting Up Work Resources

Work resources are the people and equipment that do the work of the project. Project focuses on two aspects of work resources: their availability and their costs. Availability determines when specific resources can work on tasks and how much work they can perform, and costs refer to how much money will be required to pay for those resources.

Some examples of work resources are listed in this table.

Work Resource

Example

Individual people identified by name.

Jun Cao; Zac Woodall

Individual people identified by job title or function.

Publisher; Contract specialist

Groups of people who have common skills. (When assigning such interchangeable resources to a task, you might not be concerned about who the individual resource is so long as they have the right skills.)

Copyeditors; Typesetters

Equipment.

Offset lithography press

Equipment Resource Considerations

In Project, you set up people and equipment resources in exactly the same way; they are both examples of work resources. However, you should be aware of important differences in how you can schedule these two work resources. Most people resources have a working day of typically 8 and usually no more than 12 hours, but equipment resources might have much more varied capacities for work, ranging from short durations (followed by maintenance) to around the clock without interruption. Moreover, people resources might be flexible in the tasks they can perform, but equipment resources tend to be more specialized. For example, a content editor for a book project might also act as a copyeditor in a pinch, but a desktop copy machine cannot replace a printing press.

You do not need to track every piece of equipment that will be used in your project, but you might want to set up equipment resources when

  • Multiple teams or people might need a piece of equipment to accomplish different tasks simultaneously, and the equipment might be overbooked.

  • You want to plan and track costs associated with the equipment.

Consider these issues if your projects involve equipment resources.

Project can help you make smarter decisions about managing work resources and monitoring financial costs.

In this exercise, you enter the names of several people resources.

SET UP

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Start Project if it’s not already running.

You need the Simple Resources_Start project plan located in your Chapter03 practice file folder to complete this exercise. Open the Simple Resources_Start project plan, and then follow these steps.

  1. On the File tab, click Save As.

    Project displays the Save As dialog box.

  2. In the File name box, type Simple Resources, and then click Save.

    TIP

    You can instruct Project to automatically save the active project plan at predefined intervals, such as every 10 minutes. On the File tab, click Options. In the Project Options dialog box, click Save, select the Auto Save Every check box, and then specify the time interval you want.

  3. On the View tab, in the Resource Views group, click Resource Sheet.

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    You will use the Resource Sheet view to enter the initial list of resources for the new book launch project.

  4. Click the cell directly below the Resource Name column heading.

  5. Type Jun Cao, and press the Enter key.

    Project creates a new resource.

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  6. On the next empty rows in the Resource Name column, enter the following names:

    Sharon Salavaria

    Toby Nixon

    Toni Poe

    Zac Woodall

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    These are all individual people. You can also have a resource that represents multiple people. You’ll enter such a resource next.

  7. In the Resource Name field, below the last resource, type Copyeditors, and then press Enter.

What Is the Best Way to Enter Resource Names?

In Project, work resource names can refer to specific people (Sharon Salavaria) or to specific job titles, such as Publisher or Contract Specialist. Use whatever naming convention makes the most sense to you and to those who will see your project plan information. The important questions are: who will see these resource names, and how will they identify the resources? The resource names that you choose will appear both in Project and in any resource information shared from Project. For example, in the default Gantt Chart view, the name of the resource appears next to the bars of the tasks to which that resource is assigned.

A resource might refer to somebody who is already on staff or to a position to be filled later. If you have not yet filled all the resource positions required, you might not have real people’s names to enter. In that case, use descriptive placeholder names or job titles when setting up resources in Project.

Save to your account

This chapter is from the book