SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I rarely use team planner in my day to day activities what is a shame as it cool be valuable tool for anyone that regularly works with resources. In this post I will try to explain team planner and how you can use it. I will for instance show how resource leveling works and of course all the other options that are available.

Again I will be using Project Professional 2013 for this post. This is still in the preview version and it is not the final product. If you are curious about Project Professional 2013 you can go here and try it out for yourself.

Team planner what is it?

The new feature team planner was added in Project Professional 2010. This feature lets you plan your tasks for resources in a kind of roster. It is also great to spot over allocations and resolving these over allocations. As you can see in the image below you can see that Molly Dempsey is over allocated because she has to do two tasks at once.

Team planner here allows you to move your tasks to solve this over allocation. In this case above you have two options. 1. Reschedule your task or 2. Assign the task to someone else, and this is easy, you can just drag and drop the task.

Within team planner you have also the ability to use resource leveling. Resource leveling does exactly how it sounds. It will automatically solve (reschedule tasks) the over allocations you have your project. While this sounds cool I should also warn you that I might not always does what you want to do. Treat carefully when using this feature. As you can see in the image below I leveled the resource Molly Dempsey. Microsoft Project will automatically solve the over allocation by placing one task behind the other. This solved the over allocation. However some tasks that have dependencies have been delayed. Like I said be carefully as this will not always do what you want it to do. This is mostly because of dependencies and constraints of a task you didn’t think about.

Always carefully inspect what Microsoft Project has done to your project. A good way to do this is set a baseline before you level. It is a great way to keep track of the changes made in your project. If you don’t know how to make a baseline and use it here is a early post I have made about baselines. Practice makes Perfect Part 2 – Baseline

You have four options when using resource leveling. Level resource will level the selected resource. Level All will level all of your resources in your project. Luckily you have the option to use Clear Leveling if you don’t like what leveling did to your project. Then you also have the ability to play around with the Leveling Options. I am not going to highlight these options here as they are pretty straight forward. Just look at them and play around with some settings.

There are some more things you can do with team planner like adding a note to a resource, great for reminding you what you did with a particular resources. You see check the information of the resource and you can even create a new resource in the team planner view.

The last thing I want to talk about is the details view. I recommend you turn this on all the time. This will give you all the information on the selected resource like what the resource is working ect. This information can be really useful when rescheduling tasks.

I hope this will give you a bit more insight in what you are able to do with the team planner feature and how you can use it when you want to handle over allocations in your project plan.

Up next in the Practice makes Perfect series – Groups and Filters.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/practice-makes-perfect-part-6-team-planner/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)