Its well known that Microsoft Project is one of the most widely used tools in the field of project management. It can also be very handy if used for resource management. Let's look at a few reasons to use Microsoft Project for resource management.
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| Team Task Reports |
# 1 : Basic Resource Maintenance
- MS Project allows a project manager to add new resources easily. MS Project allows project managers to assign different rates which are used to calculate costs.
- MS Project can be used to set different work times for different resources.
- Configuring public holidays is easy and can be applied at a global level.
- Using filters and groups a project manager can see different views of resource information.
- Custom Fields can be defined for resources to add any additional information like skill set, employment type etc.
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# 2 : Share Resources with a Resource Pool
- All the project plans will use the same resource pool. Conflicts in resource allocations can be easily identified. This is the most important advantage of using a resource pool.
- Microsoft Project reports can be used to create built-in reports on all the resources in the pool.
- Easy to find out all the tasks for any given resource is working on.
- Holidays, vacations, availability, cost and other resource specific properties can be setup at a central location.
- Having all of the resources defined in a central location will also mean resources name, vacations, cost etc will be consistent across the organization's project plans. Easy to find out availability of any resource.
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# 3 : Manage a team of resources
- Using master project plans and resource pool allows a project manager to get a combined view of the entire resource pool.
- Using custom fields of resource category MS Project can be used to maintain teams.
- The approach will utilize some of the well know and widely used features like resource usage views.
- You can export the data and views easily to excel or any other spreadsheet for reports.
- Last and the best - your resource allocations will be driven by project allocations.
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# 4 : Generate Resource Utilization and other custom reports
- MS project provides some very useful options to generate and customize reports.
- By default MS Project has some very useful reports like Resource Overview, Over Allocated Resources.
- Custom Reports can be designed and generated very easily.
- MS Projects provides pivot style (Field List) which can be used to slice and dice data.
- Please see the article below to see how you can generate - Team Work Load Report, Resource Allocation Report and Resource Availability Report.