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)

With the Project Preview that started in July I had the time to test out Project Online. For people that do not know what Project Online is, it is basically Project Server 2013 in the cloud.

Previously made a post about the Project Professional Timeline and how you can use it. That post you can find here and this post is a little addition as Project Online has the Timeline in Project Web Access. I personally really like this addition to Project Web Access as it gives you a nice graphical presentation of your project. However there is a little more in Project Online.

Project Online is still in the preview version this is not the final product so changes can still be made.

So what is it?

Next to the normal functionality of the timeline what is now available in Project Web Access you have the added ability to add projects to the timeline. This enables you to make a graphical presentation of all your projects over time or just a subset of your projects whatever you prefer. So you are basically able to make your own Project Calendar pretty neat right?

So how does it work?

The timeline view in Project Web Access work the same as it does in Project Professional. Go to your project and select the task you want to add to the timeline.

Click add to timeline and you are done. From here you have the options to give them any color you want, make callout tasks and so on.

How can I do this for Projects?

When you are in project center you can select a project and in your projects menu you can select add project. If you want you can even add tasks to that view from a selected project.

When your done adding your projects to the timeline you can create something like this.

Pretty cool I would say. With just a few mouse clicks you can make a graphical presentation of your entire portfolio. If you click on a specific project in the timeline you can even open de project directly from the there.

Microsoft really tried to make Project Web Access as good as it can get. All these little features really make it easy for a project manager to do most of his work just from his browser.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/project-online-the-timeline-in-project-web-access/

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)

Next week on the 6th of September Ill be giving a Dutch presentation at Microsoft in the Netherlands about the new version of Microsoft Project. Ill be giving a overview on Microsoft Project Professional 2013 and Project Online. I will demonstrate all the new features that are available in the new version.

This session will give you a good overview of what’s new and coming your way and how to use the new version of Project in your business.

There are still places left for this free session so if you are interested you can sign up here. Please keep in mind this session is in the Netherlands and will be given in dutch.

First Look new release of Microsoft Project

Hope to see you there.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/first-look-session-on-the-new-release-of-microsoft-project/

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)

I was triggered to make this post about the Resource Pool functionality because I see a lot of questions about it popping up from clients and forums I am involved in.

In this post I will give a quick overview of how you create and use a resource pool.

Note that I am talking about Project Professional here and not the Project Server Enterprise resource pool functionality. I hope this post will give some insight in how you can use this functionality without having the luxury of Project Server.

Again I will be using Microsoft Project Professional 2013 to demonstrate this. However this is the preview version and not the final product changes may still occur.

What is a resource pool?

A resource pool is used to centralize the company resources in a Microsoft Project file. So in essence this Microsoft Project file will contain every employee that can be assigned to a project. The project file can then be saved to a file share so that everyone can access it or it can be saved locally if you only want to use it for yourself. When it is saved you can connect your project plans to the resource pool and gain access to the resources.

Note this file cannot reside on SharePoint. Project Professional won’t allow you to connect to the resource pool that is located on SharePoint.

So what can a resource pool mean for me?

With your project plans connected to the resource pool you can access and assign resource to your projects. When multiple projects share the same resource pool you will get a good view of the allocation of the company resources. This also allows you to see over-allocated resources where you have the ability to act on it.

So how do I create a resource pool?

The first thing you need to do is open Microsoft Project Professional and save the file to the location where you want your resource pool to reside. Give it a clear name that it is the resource pool. For this post I will call mine CXS Resource Pool.

When you created the file and saved it, you have to start filling it with your resources. Depending on how many resources you need to fill in this could take a while. A little trick to make it easy. If you happen to have a excel fill with employees names you can just copy it into the resource sheet.

Note: Make sure you have a name convention in place. Project doesn’t see the difference between R. Kruithof or Robin Kruithof. This could lead to duplicate resource in your resource pool and we don’t want that.

Ok now that we saved are resource pool and filled it with resources let’s see what it does, shall we.

Now that I have created my resource pool, how do I use it?

Before I tell you how to use it I have to tell you about the catch. To use the resource pool with your project it also need to be opened. This however can be in read-only mode as long as you have it open. Otherwise your project is not able to get the resource information out of the resource pool. Now that’s out of the way let’s continue.

Create your project and go to the resource tab. Click on Resource Pool and then Share Resources.

Select Use resources (requires at least one open resource pool) and select your resource pool file. Also make sure that Pool takes precedence and press OK.

Note: When you link a project to the resource pool Microsoft Project will recognize the project file as a resource pool. Whenever you open the resource pool you will get the following message.

My advice is if you don’t need to edit always open read-only. Additionally, once a project is linked to the resource pool it will ask you if it should open it. When clicking ok it will open the resource pool in read-only mode.

Now that you have linked the project to the resource pool we can start using it. As you can see in the image below I am able to select the resources residing in the resource pool.

For this post I made two projects: Project A and Project B. Both of these projects are linked to the resource pool. Let’s see what happens when I start assigning resource to my task. For good measure I will also create some over-allocation.

As you can see in the image above the project now has a over-allocation (The red man icon identifies over-allocations). This information is gathered from the resource pool.

Ok now to see where the over-allocation resides. You can either see this from the resource pool or from the project itself.

Let’s go to the Resource Usage sheet to see where the over allocation occurs.

Tip: In the Resource Usage view add the column “Project” and open the details view as well to get a clear indication which task of which projects are creating the over allocation.

As you can see in the image above the project gives you a clear indication on where the over- allocation resides. And because you know were the conflicts are you are able to act on it by using the team planner for example.

In the image above I have three options. One: delay the task of Project B. Two: delay the task of Project A or, Three: hand over the task to Alex running as he seems to have time. This example all depends on the priority of the projects and the ability of Alex Running to take over a task from Tim Mouse.

A resource pool gives you great insight on the resource utilization over multiple projects. Add this with the ability to make reports and you have a great way to see which resource is doing what and plan accordingly.

After playing around some more with over-allocations and reports I created the following report see image below. I love the new report functionality in Microsoft Project Professional 2013.

Note: When you want to create a report always do this in your project. The reason behind it is that while the resource pool has your resource information most reports are based on tasks even for resources. Because this information is located in the project plan you won’t be able to create a report with the information in the resource pool file itself.

I hope this gives a bit more insight in how to create a resource pool and how you can use it. It is great functionality for organizations that does not have Project Server but still want to do centralized resource management. Using the resource pool will take some time to get used to and to use it effectively. But in the end it is worth it.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/practice-makes-perfect-part-5-microsoft-project-resource-pool/

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)