Welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In the previous section I discussed some of the key points around project consolidation,
the reasons that you might want to split projects up and the reasons why you might want to join
projects together.
And one of the key aspects that comes out of that is the importance of deciding on how
to deal with resources.
And in relation to our charity event we came across the first key issue, which is that
if we start to split the event into separate projects we somehow need to make sure that
those projects are using the same resources.
And so what I’m going to cover in this section is how to set up a resource pool and how to
share the resource pool between a number of projects.
My starting point for this section is the ending point for the preceding section.
So I still have my complete list of tasks here, Charity Event All, and I also have also
open at the moment the individual Sports Day project that I created in the preceding section.
Note that the tasks involved in the Sports Day project are also still in the All project,
the one you’re looking at at the moment.
And clearly at some stage I need to remove those as they are now in a separate project.
But I’m going to set up the resource pool first.
Now one of the key aspects of a resource pool is that generally speaking we set it up as
a project with resources but no tasks.
And quite often you’ll want to set up a resource pool right at the outset when you’re
working on a project or a group of projects that are going to share that resource pool.
So on many occasions you’ll start off with a completely empty MPP.
Go to the Resource Sheet, start entering your resources, make up your resource pool, and
then save that project but with no tasks.
Now on this occasion we already have a good starting point for our resource pool because
if I look at the Resource Sheet for the All project I’ve already got all of my resources.
And I’m going to basically save a copy of the All project, remove all of the tasks in
that project and that will become my resource pool.
So what I’m going to do is click on File, Save As and then I’m going to browse to
my normal course files folder and save the Charity Event All project.
And the saved project is going to be CharityEvent_Resources.mpp.
There it is.
Click on Save.
And having saved CharityEvent_Resources.mpp what I’m going to do is to select all of
the tasks and I’m going to hit the Delete key.
I now have a project with no tasks.
But if I click to the Resource Sheet of course I still have all of my resources.
And this is now my resource pool.
Now let me switch back into the individual project, the Sports Day project.
And what I’m going to do here is to specify that this project uses that resource pool.
So I go to the Resource Sheet and on the Resource Sheet in the Assignments group there is a
Resource Pool button.
Click on the bottom of that, click on Share Resources and I’m given a choice.
Do I want to use my own resources?
That’s what’s happening at the moment.
Or do I want to use Resources requires at least one open resource pool?
When you want a project to use a resource pool in order to set up that situation initially
the resource pool.
That you want it to use must be open.
So I’m going to click on Use Resources requires at least one open resource pool.
And then I click on the potential open resource pool.
So of course there is only one at the moment.
It’s SimonSezIT_CharityEvent_Resources.mpp.
Now the meaning of the lower pair of radio buttons will become more apparent a little
bit later on, but let’s just quickly deal with it now.
On conflict with calendar or resource information the pool takes precedence or the sharer takes
precedence.
Now what can sometimes happen is that when you are looking at resource information for
shared resources there may be a conflict between the resource pool and any calendars applying
to resources in the resource pool and, for example, a calendar in the sharing project,
the sharer project.
What you need to do is to specify here which takes precedence, the pool or the sharer.
Now I’m going to leave this set at the pool, the default value at the moment, click on
OK.
When I do this, just look carefully at task ID 10.
It’s got a little red over allocation mark.
Watch what happens now when I click on OK.
Now you should recall from the preceding section that the reason it showed over allocation
here was that when this project was created by copying and pasting part of the All project
new resources were created and although I require more than one volunteer on that particular
task 10 the resource that was created in the Resource Sheet for the specific Sports Day
project only had one volunteer resource, the default value.
And therefore we have an over allocation issue.
If I now look at the Resource Sheet for the Sports Day project, bearing in mind that I’ve
just set it up to share the resource pool, if I click on Resource Sheet you’ll see
that it is now using the resource pool.
There are ten volunteers available and therefore there is no longer any over allocation.
So what I have now open is a resource pool and an individual Sports Day project that
uses that resource pool.
The other thing that I need to do is to get the All project to use the resource pool.
So let me open the All project again.
There it is.
That is still of course using its own resources.
So I’m going to click on Resource Pool, Share Resources, Use Resources, and then make
sure that I select Resources.mpp, stick with the default Pool takes precedence option,
click on OK, and now I have two projects sharing that resource pool.
Now one of the next things that I need to do is to separate fully the Charity Event
All project into in fact four separate projects.
In fact I think I might even make it five.
And each of those needs to share our resource pool.
And I’m going to make a start on that in the next section.
But before I do I want to talk a little more about resource sharing and one or two aspects
of resource sharing that it’s important to be aware of.
Now in order to do this what I’m going to do is to go to the Resource Sheet, so this
is our resource pool.
Notice that we do have some over allocated resources.
And the reason we have over allocated resources now is of course that I still have the Sports
Day activities in the All project.
I’m going to sort that out in the next section.
But what I want to do is to change the view here from Resource Sheet to Resource Usage.
And in addition I’m going to add a new column to this Resource Usage View.
The column I’m going to add is Project.
Now let me just adjust these column widths.
And what you can see now is a very important aspect of a resource pool because the resource
pool knows where the resources are being used.
And as you can see it’s got a list of the unassigned tasks, or that’s tasks for which
there are no assigned resources.
But where we have specific resources and let’s go down to one of the over allocated ones,
Sports Day PM, for example.
We can see that Sports Day PM has allocations in both the Sports Day project and the All
project.
Now some of these as we know are duplicates, some of them aren’t.
And as I said, we’ll be dealing with that in the next section.
But when you’re dealing with a shared resource pool and consolidated projects it can be very
useful to include the Project column in the table or tables that you’re using while
you’re working on those projects because it very often just clarifies which project
a resource is being used in and that’s very often a good clue to resolving over allocations
where you’re dealing with multiple projects and possibly multiple project managers assigning
resources in those projects.
So in the next section we’re going to turn our attention to splitting up the charity
event into its constituent projects.
But for the balance of this section I just want to point out a couple of very important
things about resource pools.
As I mentioned earlier on it is not necessarily the case that all of the projects that share
a resource pool are always consolidated into one project.
Even in a situation like this one where the charity event project will be split into four
or five parts and each of those parts will use this resource pool there may well be a
completely unrelated project, nothing to do with the charity event that’s also using
this resource pool and therefore will be drawing on the resources in it.
And this is a very important point to be aware of.
When you are working with a resource pool it may have a whole mixture of projects that
are using its resources.
The other point to make here is that if you’re using Microsoft Project Server then consolidation
and the use of shared resources, what’s often referred to as Enterprise Resource Planning
or ERP is handled very well and in quite a different way.
It’s done on sort of a larger scale way if you like.
In Microsoft Project as we’re using it here we are sharing resources but it is in a much
more straightforward, a much more basic way than it is in say Project Server.
So if you are going to move on to use Project Server you’ll need to find out about its
specific ways of sharing resources.
And the other thing to bear in mind in relation to that is that the sharing features of Project
Server currently require Project Professional and not just Project Standard.
So that’s something else to be aware of.
But back at our course, what we’re going to do next in the next section is to split
the charity event into its constituent projects.
I’ll see you then.