Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations gkittelson on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Resource Availability

Status
Not open for further replies.

neostar29

IS-IT--Management
Jan 5, 2007
5
CA
Hi Guys,

I want to design an "Assign Resources" dialog box
effectively that could pick resources available for a
task. My guess is you might need to use a custom
filter or a formula?

Scott
 
The first thing you're likely to be doing is creating the task list -- and now, with your approach, you'll have to add to that burden by adding the work attributes so you can match against resource attributes later on.

Then you'll add the resources (or pick them up from a resource pool). If you've added the resources then you'll probably want to code in their attributes so you can match them to the attributes for each work task.

Naturally, as the person gains experience working, you'll want to maintain the resource attributes reflecting new skills and improvements on existing ones. Since skills atrophy if they aren't used, you're also going to have to update that information.

Since resources are inevitably assigned to projects after negotiations with the resource owner, I think you may find that the overhead of doing what you want will outweigh any benefits you can expect.

As for how to do it ... a custom filter or formula isn't even going to begin to help you. There will be some form development backed up with a fair bit of "behind-the-scenes" VBA.
 
Hi PBQ,

Thanks very much for your email!

I did add the Tasks and Resources.

Now in the "Resources Names" column, I'm playing with the "Assign Resources" Dialog Box and would like to see which Resources are available for that task.

What approach must I take?
 
To the best of my knowledge there is no way to use and/or modify the filters used by the ALT+F10 screen to selectively pick resources based on an attribute of the selected task.

Good luck in your endeavours but you are trying to do something using built-in functionality that is simply not available with formulas and filters.
 
Hi PBQ,

Here's what I've got so far:

Task Name Days Start Resource Names
Analysis 1 day 4 jan jack
Design 1 day 4 jan matt
Building 4 days 24 jan jack

I want the Resources Names as listed above to behave exactly the way I want to when I use "Assign Resources" Dialog box. As you see, Jack cannot do "Design" task, but would be available for "Building" Task. Could you help me now and simplify my problem to a solution?
 
If you look at the Assign Resources dialog box you'll see Jack's name is there so you are asking to have the Assign Resources dialog box behave ... well, behave in a way that it doesn't behave.

Even after that, why can't Jack do the design task? You've got a start date but no finish date? Assign him 50% of the time on both tasks.

Even after that, what happens when tasks come in early or finish late? Are you going to go back and reassign everything?

I understand exactly what you are asking. Life is much more complex than that and schedules have even greater complexity.

Walk around your office and see if people are really working 100% of the time on a given task. It just doesn't happen and forcing your schedule to show that means that it is simply going to show an imaginary world.
 
I understand what you mean. However, there should be some flex in MS-Project to do that.

So far, I came up with a Custom Filter such as this below:

Available From - Is less than or equal to - Start
Available To - Is greater than or equal to - Finish

You know what I need right?

I basically need an Assigning Resources Dialog box to work exactly by viewing only resources available to perform the entire duration of a particular task.
 
I still cannot fathom why something this simple was rejected by you:

Window | New Window
Window | Arrange All

Click in the top window
View | Gantt

Click in the bottom window
Vieew | Resource Usage
 
I didnt get anything from your last reply. It doesn't make sense of what I need.

So I'll try and say this again:

I need an "Assign Resources" Dialog box to work (viewing Resource Names) for the duration of an entire task.
 
I know what you're asking for. It isn't available. In my second message I said "Good luck in your endeavours but you are trying to do something using built-in functionality that is simply not available with formulas and filters."

The approach I described lets you see tasks in the top window and resources in the bottom. You can visually see which resources are available for the task's duration. You can change the Resource window to display "Remaining Availability".

It doesn't need formulas, it doesn't need filters. It's available "out of the box".

It does require you to make a few clicks.



 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top