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The approach the resource management team is taking where I work is to assign resources at a summary level, rather than on each task. This is a MS-Project 2013 environment.
Q1: Are there consequences from assigning resources at the summary level?
Q2: Are you aware of any documentation from Microsoft or a third party about this topic?
Hello Kris, you may want to refer to this guide regarding construction resource management to learn more and see which approach would work better for you since a different approach might be more effective for certain situations. The post included a step-by-step guide on construction resource planning as well as tips on how to create your own resource management plan that might both be useful for you.
Kris,
The main problem with tracking resources at the summary level is that is not where the work is actually done. It will make the tracking of cost/work/time at the task level more difficult if that is required.
MS Project wants to roll everything up from the lowest elements of the project schedule to the Summary task to the Project Summary task so you might have to work around that too.
Kris,
If you’re using project server, I would recommend your Resource Management Dept. start using resource engagements. The scenario goes this way:
1) Build your detailed schedule
2) Build your enterprise team
3) Submit Resource Engagements for the Summary level work. (assumes RM Dept or RMs approves resource engagements requests)
4) RM Dept. approves resource request at summary level – Results in MS Project calculating committed work. (in Resource Plan)
5) Committed Work is just a bucket of Hours, so you have to assign the resource to the detailed tasks in order for the resource to have work assigned to them
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Hi, this is not a great idea as
1) Project “wants” to sum up from the lower levels
2) It is unlikely that everyone assigned to the summary task will be working at the same allocation level on all the sub-tasks which will result in people appearing to be busier than they really are.
3) When someone puts a sub-task summary in and then applies resources to this it will be summed up into the master summary line which may not be visible and will again cause people to look over-allocated.
4) I don’t know what impact this would have on levelling if you chose to do it but I would expect the results to be sub-optimal.
What is driving this decision? Is it the ease of only having to add the resources once and all the sub tasks have resources “applied”? If so remember that you can copy resources down using <CTRL><D>…