MS Project scheduling

Question

I have a MS Project problem: say you have 3 rooms and 5 clerks, they will work for 3 weeks, one clerk in one room daily based on the availability of the rooms , the rooms need to be staffed 5 days a week. How do you get that schedule done (which clerk works when) ?

Answer 1

steel poney,

The main purpose of resource leveling is to alleviate overallocation, that is, shift tasks and resources such that all or selected resources are not assigned to work more hours than are contained in a normal workday. For example, let's say you assigned resource A to work rooms 1 & 2 on Monday. That would mean resource A is overallocated by 8 hours. Depending on the priority assigned (task level), resource leveling will shift the lower priority task to remove the overallocation.

There is no automated way to set up the schedule you want. It's pretty straightforward to do but you'll have to do it manually. Set up your rooms as tasks and assign all four resources to each room. Then go to the Resource Usage view and set each resource's hours to zero for those days and rooms they will not be working. A bit tedious but I can't come up with a quicker way to do it.

John

Answer 2

Hi,

I'm sorry to confirm what you may have suspected from the roaring silence following your question: the functionality to do this automatically in Project doesn't exist.

Greetings,

Answer 3

"The simple solution is to assign one of the 5 clerks (resources) full time (i.e. 8-5) to each of the 3 rooms, (tasks), for three weeks." I think that's what I want. How do I do that ? This is how I tried:

rooms 1,2,3 are tasks that should start on the same day and should go for Duration of 15 days and the resources (to staff them) are workers a,b,c,d,e.

When I hit level resources  rooms no longer have the same start or the same finish.

Answer 4

Using 2010, up to date.

This is not a true work project, just a problem that I came up with to help me understand MS Project.  So the room availability is standard, 8h/d, the question is how do you schedule 5 workers in 3 rooms (obviously  some of them will be off some days). I am looking for some way that the two resources (workers and rooms) can be allocated to each-other automatically. MS Project has so much compex functionality and so many options, that you would think there would be a way to make it come out with a scheduling to a simple problem of this type (example Rooms 1,2,3 and Workers A,B,C,D,E):

Monday    A    B    C    D    E

1              8h

2                    8h

3                          8h

Tuesday    A    B    C    D    E

1                    8h

2                          8h

3                                8h

Wednesday    A    B    C    D    E

1                               8h

2                                     8h

3                                           8h

Thursday    A    B    C    D    E

1                                 8h

2                                       8h

3              8h

Friday        A    B     C    D     E

1                                        8h

2               8h

3                     8h

Answer 5

steel poney,

Something's missing from your scenario. The simple solution is to assign one of the 5 clerks (resources) full time (i.e. 8-5) to each of the 3 rooms, (tasks), for three weeks. You have 2 clerks on standby. But that's probably not what you want.

So what is the room availability? Do each of the clerks work full time? What is the clerk availability?

Fill in the missing information and then we can help you.

By the way, what version of Project are you using and does it have the latest service pack installed?

John