You will find innumerable books and articles out there on Resource Management. Most of them deal with the complexities of the topic, and it takes a while to get started using Microsoft Project for Resource Management. This article takes a different approach with doing, followed by learning.
Once a project has been broken down into manageable tasks and the dependencies between the tasks have been defined, it is very easy to enter the details in Microsoft Project. The Gantt Chart and the Network Diagram created by Microsoft Project at this stage give substantial insights into the time dimension of your project plan, indicating the minimum total duration through the critical path, the slack available for activities which are not on the critical path, group-wise task schedules, and so forth.
In case you are totally new to Microsoft Project, we have some interesting tutorial lessons available at Bright Hub. For a quick refresher, see these articles on how to start a project using Microsoft Project, and how to define dependencies between tasks in a project.
We will start with a project involving the activities to be carried out by an Event Management firm in organizing a concert. Initially the project is broken down into a set of high-level activities as given here.
(Note: To see a larger view of any image in this article, please click on the image.)
Please enter the activities shown with their duration and dependencies, and save the file as “Concert Project.”
The question then is "who" and "what" are required to implement this project plan. The answer to this lies in the resources.
Let us now indicate to Microsoft Project, "who" all is available in the firm to perform the activities defined in our Concert Project. We will include the following resources in Microsoft Project as entities available:
- Operations/Admin Assistants
- Operations/Admin Executive
- Sales Assistants
- Sales Executive
- Project Manager
As you will realize, these are the “human” resources available in the firm for implementing the project. To indicate "what" is available, let us include:
These are the equipment resources available. (Microsoft Project treats equipments and materials similarly and hence, these may also be referred to as material resources.)
Besides naming the resources, you will realize intuitively that we need to indicate two more important pieces of information to Microsoft Project:
- How many of each of the above resources is available for assignment to the project?
- Are there periods when some of the resources are unavailable, due to planned leave, or commitment to other projects?
In our case, we will assume, we have:
- 3 Opns/Admin Assistants (One is on leave from 16 Sep to 30 Sep)
- 2 Sales Assistants (Both on leave from 28 Sep till 9 Oct)
- 1 Opns Executive, 1 Sales Executive and 1 Project Manager available throughout the project
How do we indicate all this to Microsoft Project?
Please proceed to Page 2 to understand how these resource details are entered in Microsoft Project.