Need some help with Ms Project 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Need some help with Ms Project 2010

1 point_ud4a2 comments

in my organization i've been put in charge to manage a group of around 45 people and give them some structure. currently projects come and go without any proper way of resource management.

i'm trying to use Ms Project to handle the situation.

these 45 people are spread into 5 different groups (QA, coding, designer, helpdesk, operations).

at any on point any of them could be working on multiple projects.

is the best way to handle this to create one project and treat all the projects these people are working on as "tasks" under the umberella project?

i would greatly appreciate some input.

thanks

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First, the best ever PM book I have read is "How to cheat at IT project management"

Second, you can set your users up in a global resources file and track their availability across multiple project.

You could also get your hands on CBT Nuggets training - which is great.

You should require your company to fund some training for you to succeed in this position - CBT Nuggets training DVDs, Lynda.com account etc... are very affordable - especially when you are tasked with tracking 45 people - that is a hell of a lot of people to track if you are brand new to it.

To answer your question, you can click on RESOURCE tab, then NEXT OVER ALLOCATION to have project check for over allocations to your staff (RESOURCES)

Also, click on VIEW, then on RESOURCE USAGE to show the allocations of the resources. It will give a summary as well as a detail of the items they are assigned to.

Obviously, this is all predicated on accurate assumptions on your part as to how long something takes.

What you may find easier at first, is to allocate resources to tasks at a higher level in order to build out the project, for example, you may want to assign the "IT TEAM" "Setup Server Environment" as a multi day task, say 1W -- then assign "DEVELOPMENT TEAM" a multi day task, "SETUP DEV ENVIRON"

Then underneath these, break out the subtasks "SETUP WEB SERVER, 1-day" "SETUP DB SERVER 1 day" etc...

Work your way through the tasks refining the time allocation each iteration, based on input from the team.

You should save out these setup processes out to re-use them as you move forward.

When you get status from a team member on the completion of an item, ask them how long it actually took.

If they have 2 days allotted to setup a server, but they wait till the end of the second day and the setup only takes 2 hours... you need to find that out, and document it.

Ultimately, this will build an understanding of actual time costs for actions and you'll be able to build out skeletal plans very easily and know when others are making misstatements about durations...

Hope that helps.

Watch the lynda.com ms project vids - if you're in a crunch, PM me and Ill get you them...

thanks for the detailed response. really appreciate it and i'm going to check out the lynda.com videos tonight when i get home.

cheers

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