Description

You are responsible for project planning and already have a reliable schedule? This E-Learning Course about resource management in MS Project will teach you to explain how the (un) availability of resources affects the project by applying MS Project’s resourcing features.

What will you be able to do after the course?
At this point you have a perfect model of your project that will forecast your main deliveries. By now, we can promise you that your schedule already outperforms 80% of the schedules being made throughout the world.

It could be though that it is not realistic enough yet, as resources induce many additional dependencies. You could think of shortage of resources with a certain skill set, holidays, or responsibilities in other projects. If you or your organization require more, this step 4 will explain you how to achieve that.

First of all, a resource is any means that needs to be used for tasks and thus projects to complete. Think of people with certain skills, test machines, facilities, money etc. Apart from resources there is a responsible person, who does not necessarily need to spend time on a task to complete. Resources should only be assigned to tasks, when doing this has a significant impact to the quality or duration of the schedule.

Also note that as a communication means, a schedule could have different audiences:

- Bottom-up – only use resources for those tasks that affect the critical path
- Top-down – use resources for all your tasks as you use your schedule to communicate their workload and what is expected of them
- The goal of planning with resources it to be able to determine what is needed of the variable parameter(s) to achieve the project goal:

- Scope and timing with constrained resources
- Timing and resources with constrained scope
- Scope and resources with constrained timing
- We will explain you how you can use the resource leveling features in MS project to explain for which of these three parameters you need help or a decision from your manager or steering committee.