Forum Discussion
How to allocate resources within a group
It sounds like you have given good thought to the various options but unfortunately it all boils down to using either a group resource (i.e."Team") or individual resources. Project has no option for an either/or.
I think the best you can do is to use individual resources and then carefully manage assignments. Leveling can help with overallocations but it will not optimize resource usage.
Those are my thoughts, perhaps a colleague will offer other suggestions.
John
Excellent suggestion. It is analogous to a method we used for long term planning (i.e. projects spanning a year or more). Near term tasks were planned out in detail. Effort 6-9 months out and beyond were set up a "planning packages". Planning packages had a defined budget but only a very general set of task descriptions. As time progressed, planning packages were converted to detail planning.
I think you need to give yourself credit for the best answer for this question.
John
- therealToomanyhats --
The Team Assignment Pool and Team Name features are part of Project Online or Project Server and would be available in Microsoft Project Professional when connected with either one of those applications. They are enterprise features that are not available when Microsoft Project Professional is used in desktop-only mode. Hope this helps.- Thanks. We have used Team Name for task switching in PWA. It is not the most graceful interface but I thought it might help db8673 if it was in Desktop.
- therealToomanyhats --
Totally. The beauty of the Team Resource feature is that it allows for "pick up" work. For example, I have a team of five electronics technicians. I want to assign all five of them to a task, but have only ONE of them do the task, while the other four "drop off" the task. The Team Resource feature would handle this easily. Sadly, it is an under-utilized feature in Project Online and Project Server, and not available at all in the Microsoft Project desktop application. Thanks for sharing, by the way! I appreciate it.
Dale is better qualified to answer this question since I don't use PWA. As a stand alone app, Project Pro has Team Planner and it also supports resource pool configuration so you could create a team based pool file using group resources.
Keep in mind that Project Pro works with Project Server which has PWA as part of the enterprise configuration.
John
