For resource managers, project office staff and enterprise resource pool administrators that use Project Web Access and Microsoft Project

About this Course

This 2-day course prepares resource managers to manage their resources effectively in a Project Server environment. The course is a hands-on workshop in which participants will work with a real database of projects of a virtual organization. Participants will have access to the Project Server database and will do hands-on exercises.

Dates: Click here for a listing of course dates.

Learning Objectives

After this course, you will

• Be able to model different types of resource availabilities
• Be able to model different types of resource cost
• Be able to create and maintain admin projects to capture administrative, non-project hours on time sheets
• Be able to manage individual resource vacations in the enterprise resource pool
• Be able to monitor resource workloads and resolve over-allocations (workload leveling) in an enterprise resource pool
• Be able to optimize the resource usage on the short term by optimizing the critical resources, resource substitution and workload leveling
• Be able to determine a target resource capacity for the long term (resource capacity planning)

With the arrival of Microsoft Project Server, many organizations have an opportunity to improve the management of their projects, resources and portfolios. In this course, we will focus on how organizations can improve the quality of their resource management using Project Server. The quality of resource management will be measured in terms of the quantity of projects, the utilization of resources, and the equal spread of workload across resources. Of course, there are many other facets to resource management (job satisfaction, motivation etc.), but the scope of this course will be focused on the facets of resource management that can be monitored and managed through Project Server.

Topics

Review of the current resource management theory

Modeling different resource availabilities in the Enterprise Resource Pool:

• Temporary
• Varying availability
• Part-time
• Full-time
• Compressed workweeks
  • 4-40 workweek
  • 9-80 workweek
• Overtime
• Consolidated resources

Modeling different types of resource costs

• Human Resource Costs
• Material Costs
• Facility and Machine Costs
• Varying Cost Rates
• Fixed Cost in the Gantt Chart
• Linking to a Cost field calculated in MS Office Excel

Managing administrative, non-project hours

• Administrative work versus Maintenance work
• What is the appropriate level of detail? What should you capture and what not?
• Admin Projects for collecting actual hours spent in the past
• Categories for admin work: voice mail, email, sickness, absence, leave, time off without pay
• Categories for maintenance work: help desk, technical support, customer support, hot fixes, patches, service packs, repairs
• Performance issues with Admin projects; ways to protect system performance
• How to set up admin projects?
• Getting reports on actual hours spent on admin work
• Resource Calendars for planned time off in the future
• Categories: vacation, jury/civic duty, professional development
• Business process for authorizing and entering the time off on the resource calendars

The Resource capacity is flexible on longer term, but fixed on the short term (constraint):

• Determining for your organization for how many weeks/months from now the resource capacity is fixed
• Flexible resource capacity: the goal is to find the optimum resource capacity on the longer term (resource capacity planning) and to level the workloads within the target capacity. This will produce the target finish dates for the projects in the portfolio. For many organizations, the resource capacity is flexible in the 3-6 months look ahead window.
• Fixed resource capacity: the goal is to level the workloads and optimize resource usage on the short term given a fixed resource capacity (resource usage optimization). For many organizations, the resource capacity is fixed in the 0-3 months look ahead window.

Resource capacity planning:

• How to create a headcount report with number of resources available versus needed by skill, department or region
• Determine the most critical resource for the 3-6 month time frame (flexible resource capacity). Decide if you should hire or train more people in these critical skills, or if you need to trim non-critical resources to balance the organization.
  

Resource usage optimization

• Formula to calculate the resource utilization
• Creating a resource utilization pivot table
• Improving resource utilization in the 0-3 month time frame:
  • Resource Substitution
  • Optimizing the Critical Resources

Resource substitution

• What is needed for resource substitution:
  • skill defined, entered and maintained for resources
  • skills needed assigned to detail tasks

• Customizing skill fields in Project Server:
• Concerns about the about the output of the Resource Substitution Wizard
• Need for leveling workloads after resource substitution

Resource workload leveling with Microsoft Project

• Automatic leveling
  • Quantifying the time risk in a portfolio caused by over-allocations
  • Level workloads in a master schedule
  • Leveling options: exclusions, priority numbers
  • Checking the results
• Manual leveling
  • Using Free Slack or Total Slack
  • Improving the Resource Allocation View

Optimizing the Critical Resources

• Theory of constraints: the critical resource determines the throughput capacity of an organization:
• The resource constraint and the importance of project ranking
• Determine the most critical resource for the 0-3 month time frame (fixed resource capacity) and explore how to exploit this restricting resource capacity to the maximum:
  • Are these most critical resources the best ones in their skill category? If not, you can make improvements.
  • Do the most critical resources manage their limited time well? Do they use disruption-avoidance techniques well? Do they use concentration-enhancement techniques? Do they apply their limited productive hours well? Do they not stress or tire themselves unnecessarily?
  • Are they multi-tasked or single-tasked? Multi-tasking is known to be less productive.
  • Will you make these critical resources King-of-the-time when they are critical? (Pass the King’s crown).