Budgeted resource – Saving Budget to your project

Sometime during planning and even in executing you have been assigned some budget by company irrespective of what is actually needed to your project, for example your dept. can only spend X amount of euro in particular fiscal year or X amount of hours or X amount of material. Sometime it makes sense that we keep note of this while we do our planning.

Let us say we have 100 days and 80,000 Eur approvals from management and if the project plan or actual is more than this value we need extra approvals from top management. It is important to save this in our project

To do this we need create Budget Resources.

Go to Resource sheet and create two different resources, Budgeted_Cost of type cost and Budgeted_days type work.

To do this double click on empty line in resource sheet and in Resource Information tab select type as “Cost” and check “Budget” checkbox.

Adding Budgeted Cost Resource

To create Budgeted_days resource, follow the same steps but select the type as “Work”
You will see for this type of resource the “Resource Availability” will be disabled.

Adding Budgeted Work

Also you will see that cost tab is deactivated. The standard rates are not available.  Reason it has the special purpose we will see this soon.

Budgeted Resources 

Now you created the budgeted resource now it is time to assign them. One thing you must always remember that you cannot assign the budgeted resources to any task or even to summary task. 

Error When you try to assign resource to Task or Summary Task

You can assign the budgeted resources only to overall summary task.

Correct Way of Assigning Budgeted Resources

The best way to analyze budgeted resource in Task Usage screen where you can use them for comparing same against actual.

Switching to Task Usage

Task Usage view

Maintain Resource calendar

As setting up project calendar is an important thing that must be done at the beginning of project, similarly maintaining  the resource calendar for your “planning” step. You may face  project disaster if your resource who is assigned to the critical path task has planned leave and you have not taken care of same in your plan.

Maintaining resource calendar is easy in MS Project, the difficult part is to get details I know ;)  …

When you define work resource in MS Project, Project will automatically create a calendar with the respective resource name. You just need to maintain it like the one we maintained for the project.

Let us assume that Swapnali is on a planned vacation on 16th Jan 2015. If you don’t inform this to project, project will assign work to her during this period, however if you maintain her leaves project will take care of this situation and adjust the work accordingly.

Project task prior maintaining resource calendar

To maintain respective resource calendar, go to manage working time and select Swapnali's calendar from drop-down. Now select  16th Jan and Mark it as holiday.

Maintain resource calendar

Now once you click ok, you can see project has taken the leave in consideration and automatically adjusted the dates for dependent tasks.

Request/Demand (assignment field)

When you use “Assign Resource” dialog box for assigning resource you can see small field with mark “R/D” . This is the Request/Demand field.

Assign Resource

When you mark resource as “Demand” it indicates that the specified resource must be used and not substituted. When you mark resource as “Request” it indicates that the specified resource should be used unless the resource is over allocated. Request/Demand field is manually entered and can be used to specify how and which resources can be assigned to tasks when the Resource Substitution Wizard is activated.

The default option is “Blank”, indicates that any qualified resource can be assigned to the task.

This option can be best used with Task Usage or Resource Usage view when you want to display or change the resource substitution type for an assignment.

Note that the Request/Demand field is disabled for generic resources.

In Project Professional 2010, connected to Project Server 2010, it was possible for project managers to assign resources to tasks and then specify whether that assignment was a Request or a Demand, depending on their view of which resources could carry out that task. Running the Resource Substitution Wizard would then attempt to level resources.

The Resource Substitution Wizard is no longer available in Project Professional 2013, so one would assume that there would be no need to be able to specify a Request or Demand field for resource assignments.

Generic Resources

Some time during project planning you are not sure about of the specific individuals that will eventually be assigned to the work. In such cases you can create resource and mark them as generic resource.Generic resources can help indicate demand for resources in a specific role. This helps with capacity planning, and can be a deciding factor during portfolio analysis. Certain resources are identified as generic resources. This allows them to be identified by skill rather than by name. The Generic field indicates whether a resource is generic or not.

To Mark resource as generic, in Resource Information check the Generic checkbox.

Marking Generic Resource

You can also specify non-enterprise resources as generic. You can add the Generic field and set it to Yes for generic resources or in the Resource Information dialog box, select the Generic check box on the General tab.

For example in our case we will create resource vendor to outsourced jobs in our project.

 Use the Resource Substitution Wizard to automatically replace generic resources with actual resources from the enterprise resource pool.

Assigning Resource to Task

Once you set up your resources it is easy to assign them to respective task. The easiest method to assign resource via Gantt chart view, to add resource to task  click on Resource column in Gantt view and it would popup all the resources.

Adding resource in Gantt chart

Other way is to double click on task and from Task Information tab you can select the resources, This method gives more controls like you can define the % availability of resource and can maintain cost manually.

Assigning resource via Task Information

In our scenario Jayant is only 50 % available during coding so we can enter the % units. The cost for hourly resources is automatically calculated by MS Project.

The other way to add resource is via "Assign Resource" button in Resource Menu.

Assigning Resource from Resource Menu

To assign resource to task first select the task and click on Assign Resources button in resource menu, this will launch the Assign Resource window.

Assign Resources

If there is any conflict with your resources assignment , project will show smart tag that will quickly show you the possible solution to resolve any conflicts. When resource are over allocated MS Project will mark red icon in front of task.

Smart tag while assigning resources.

Defining Resources and working with Resource sheet.

We have seen in details resource sheet, now let's add resources details as per our scenario.
To define resources as per our requirement, select resource sheet from any view.
Now as per our scenario we will update the details.

Resource Sheet

Please note we assume all resource work in standard time thus we have set Standard calendar to respective Work resources.

There is no value maintained for cost resources as that will be done at task level.

Resource Menu

Resource Menu toolbar

As the name suggest the toolbar is more useful with the Resource related views. As we seen earlier the view group can help to quickly switch between different views.

“Assignment group” useful when we start assigning resources to respective task. The Resource pool is quite interesting tool which will be useful when you are working with multiple projects and the resources are shared between the different projects.

Share Resources 

We will see this in more details when we try to see managing multiple projects/program in latter sessions.

Add resource can help you to add resources of respective types, it creates entry in resource sheet when you click on any one of the type of resource (“Work”, “Material” or “Cost”).

Add Resources

You can import resource from your companies Active Directory or from Address Book. This is useful if you don’t want to maintain the details separately.

In Microsoft Project Professional 2010, you can add resources to the list of enterprise resources that are contained within Project Server using last option “Import Resources to Enterprise” this will be only available if you are working with Project Server.

The property group, as the name on buttons shown can be used to see or edit more details of resources.

We will work with resources in detailed way in future when we work on scenario.

The last group is leveling, this is useful when we over allocate any resource and we want Project to take care of resource time adjustment.