Within Microsoft Project Server, a resource plan is a forecasting
tool for estimation, used at the early stages of project initiation. It’s a way
to estimate resource capacity where projects are in different state, in other
words, it helps you to define high level resource needs for each project or
initiative.
Because you can use it during early stages of projects, there
might not be any task or WBS defined yet, some projects might be just proposed
and not handed over to Project Manager.
More often, resource plan utilize
resources that are generic just to get some idea of capacity. Using named
resources might also help resource managers to understand their team’s
availability and capacity.
Let see how it works:
1) First you create a project: Open the Project Center on PWA and create a new project.
Select the resources you would like to
add to your resource plan. You can easily filter generic resources by clicking
on column header.
Once all team members are selected,
click on Save & Close.
4) Back to the resource plans
page, you can customize your resource plan.
First, you can select from what your resource utilization is calculated
from:
You can calculate capacity from the following 3 options:
- Resource
Plan: This is used at early stage of projects/initiatives for rough
estimates
- Project
Plan: When the project is scoped, resource estimates are more accurate
- Project
Plan until: This is used for rolling estimates. If you have part of
the project in execution and resource plans for other parts (e.g. phase 2)
For our example, we will chose from Resource plan. Be careful, the default
value is Project Plan.
Second element to configure is the Date Range. You have to estimate your
project start and end date. Based on my experience, you can use previous
project’s lessons learned to estimate project duration. This is called the “Historical analysis” technique.
- Hours
- Days
- Full-time Equivalent (FTE)
6) Depending on the duration
of your project, you can display your resource plan with different time scales:
- Days
- Weeks
- Months
- Quarters
- Years
The difference between
those 2 booking types is well explained on MSDN: “Select Committed if you want to commit the resource to the project, or
select Proposed if you do not yet have authorization to commit the resource to
the project.”
8) Export to Excel is also available, no need to explain more about that feature J
9) Publish your resource plan when you are done. Once published, it’s part of the resource utilization. Let’s see this.
8) Export to Excel is also available, no need to explain more about that feature J
9) Publish your resource plan when you are done. Once published, it’s part of the resource utilization. Let’s see this.
10) Select the Architect role
and click on Resource Availability
button.
If only committed resources
are displayed (Do not include proposed
bookings) you can see the assignment work of the Architect, with no over
allocation. On the table below, you see also the utilization from (Resource plan).
Including proposed booking,
you see our architect has been proposed for one project (New corporate
architecture) which make him over allocated. This is a very useful tool for
resource managers.
11) Next steps? When your
project is approved, you can easily move
resource plan’s team to project team.
12) Resource
plans and strategic portfolio analysis
Resource plans are the main input to the Portfolio engine
when the portfolio analyst or PMO start evaluating proposals. Resource analysis
is mainly based on resource plans as projects are not all yet authorized.
3 commentaires:
Thanks!
Hi,
Nice information and can you explain about How do you save a Microsoft Project file as a PDF?
Thanks,
johnSmith,
Ms Project Developer
To export as PDF, simply use: FILE tab > Export > Create PDF/XPS Document
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