Hi. My company is looking for software or generally the way that solves some resource management issues. We have created several resource pools which contains people with the same skills. These resource pools are used across multiple projects in portfolio. Is there any way to do some automatic resource balancing across projects grouped in project portfolio? Currently, we are using MS Project Server 2003. Is there any PPM solution which can fairly cover our requirements? Saving Changes...
I know MS Project claims to have features to help with this, like its "Resource Substitution Wizard". I have also seen that their solution is only partial, and there are many things that are difficult to do using skills-based resource assignment.
I have seen some companies do all of their plans with skill-based resource assignments, and they never put individual people's names in the plan at all. Then the resource-usage views will cleanly add up to the total number of people with a given job title or skill. This solution only works in a relatively simple environment, where each person does one and only one type of work. As soon as you have multiple, overlapping skill sets, this system starts to break down.
I know there are many PPM solutions that claim to help with this problem, but I doubt there is one, comprehensive, universal solution. The problem is a complex one. You could take a look at solutions like Clarity, Bijingo, Daptiv, Primavera, and other similar packages. I doubt any of them will have a 100% complete solution, but some of them might fit your company better than MS Project Server does.
Another alternative is to hire a consulting firm who knows MS Project inside and out, and have them write an extension to MS Project Server to do what you want it to. The programmatic "hooks" into MS Project are pretty powerful, and it might be possible to create your own optimization engine, that substitutes resources based on your rules until you reach an optimal schedule. This would mean designing your own optimization algorithm, and it might be too complex for your needs. Saving Changes...
Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
Spider Project can help. This software includes skill scheduling.
You can create skill sets specifying which resources have different skills and assign necessary skills to the project tasks.
The software selects which resources to use basing on their availability and user defined priorities (default is the minimization of the task cost) trying to minimize overall project duration.
The same may be done in the project portfolio scheduling with project priorities applied.
Demo version may be downloaded from http://www.spiderproject.ru/demo_e.php Write to me if you will have any questions.
Best Regards,
Vladimir Saving Changes...
I would also recommend looking at Spider Project. You may have outgrown the capabilities of MS Project. Spider Project provides a lot of benefits and capabilities beyond what MS Project is capable of.
Vladimir mentions the ability to assign resources by skills, and to optimize assignments. You can also optimize the whole schedule for a number of user-selected criteria. You can even model key business metrics as outputs of tasks (# of members helped, value of sales closed, gallons of oil refined ... anything you want to define). Then you can optimize the schedule for that output.
It is a unique and powerful tool. It is definitely worth reviewing. Saving Changes...
Josh NankivelEngineering Project Manager| AppleSioux Falls, Sd, United States
Alex, I think there may be a solution that allows you to have resource pools within MS Project. I wrote a little about it here and a colleague of mine is putting it into practice now.
The gist is that you use a descriptive identifier for the resource name instead of an individual's name. You can set up your resources this way in MS Project and allocate them, just create custom fields for first name, last name, etc. that allow you to update those descriptor fields without having to revise allocations when people come and go on the project. It also allows you to easily see what resources you have available and generically what kind of skills they have. When someone leaves and you've got a resource hole, you just allocate that resource to 0% and then when you get a replacement, put them back to the right allocations and update the staff description fields. The "Resource Name" in the schedule never changes. You can use views in MS Project to show you just by resource names, or have a "current staff" view that shows you names, etc.
Your unique resource name could be something like:
Where xx is unique, 01, 02, 03, etc.
JobType.SkillLevel.xx
Type.SubType.SkillLevel.xx where type could be "programmer" and subtype could be "ASP.NET", etc.
My experience is with one project in doing this, but I'm sure if you extended this using other capabilities within MS Project you can probably make this model work to help effectively allocate resources across multiple projects.
Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
Alex, thank you for the good reference on Spider Project. I am glad that you appreciated the use of activity volumes for measuring planned and actual quantities of work. It deserves separate discussion but I want to add one essential consequence - it permits to create and to use corporate norms. We consider this as quite necessary step in PM System implementation. These norms may include resource productivities on typical activities, material requirements per unit (!) of typical activities, unit costs, etc. It is natural in construction, manufacturing, oil&gas, but we insist that it is useful also in telecom, software development, engineering. If the work is typical then it shall be measured the same way in any project of the organization.
Josh,
skill scheduling means that limited resources are assigned basing on skill requirements and activities may be delayed because all resources that have necessary skill are busy. Besides, resources may have the same skill but different productivities and activity duration will depend on the choice of resources that will do the work. Activity durations are calculated during project scheduling and are not known before.
You described different task. In your task resources are unlimited and only names may change when one resource substitute another.
I would warn you that the method you describe in MS Project will make it difficult to get a good resource utilization report, and will make resource leveling difficult or impossible.
If you have R1, R2, R3, and so on in your schedule, then MS Project resource reports will treat them each as separate people. If you use custom fields to track who is REALLY doing the work (for instance making R1 and R3 both "John Smith"), then there will be no way to view the resource utilization of the people doing the work. The automatic resource leveling features, for instance, rely on having the resource names entered accurately.
You MIGHT be able to create a custom view and custom tables that group and sort resource reports by the custom fields containing the real names, but it seems like an unnecessary complication. Task lists, assignment lists, and several other reports would also be affected.
I would recommend setting up some skill-based resources ("Programmer", "Architect", "Quality Assurance Lead", "Tester", etc.) and named resources ("Joe Smith", "Jane Doe", etc.). Do early estimates with the skill-based resource. Whenever you are ready to make an assignment, swap out the skill-based resource for the real person. If your resources change, swap resources. MS Project makes this pretty easy to manage.
I can appreciate your interest in keeping the schedule easy-to-maintain, but I think you will be losing a lot of functionality and capability of the software tool if you do not update the actual resource name. This should take just a few extra minutes, and you can do it while you are doing your regular status updates.
If you track who actually did the work, you will also have valuable historical information. Knowing who took longer or shorter to complete a similar assignment is very valuable. It has helped me calibrate team estimates in the past. Also, when we need to hand tasks from one person to another, we usually updated the estimates, to take into account the new person's skills or the hand-off time needed to transfer knowledge. Changing or adding the name was not much additional work, and it helped keep better track of what is going on.
Good luck with your project, and let us know if we can help. Saving Changes...
Not sure , if this is feasible , but if your needs are not met by products available in market , I would suggest building of an
in-house custom application using a RAD technology like Lotus Notes.In my opinion , an experienced developer should be able to make such an application in 2-3 weeks of time.You can also get automatic alerts and heads-up in advance about resource availability.
Again , this is only possible if you have Lotus Notes as your Enterprise mailing software.
For scheduling, you can continue to use MS Project , but the custom application will help you track the resource availability and hence taking necessary actions.
The trade off here might be some redundancy but I am sure data from MS Project can be migrated to Lotus Notes to reduce this.
This solution might be helpful if you are loosing a lot of time in tracking the resource availiability and whether they are fully utilized or not.
