Resource Dependent Calendar In Project Planner

Abstract: One of the challenges for a project manager is to manage his team’s working times and days. Without a proper tool to support, project manager has to remember the working times, holidays, working days of his team members manually while planning, reassigning the tasks. Now with the latest release of the Project Planner, with the help of resource dependant calendar, project manager can automatically get warning messages whenever he/she is assigning a task to the person who is on leave or whose working times do not match. The resource dependant calendar uses the company calendar as the base calendar. Hence the company holidays are automatically taken care of. Read on to understand more about the resource dependant calendar….

Introduction

For any project manager, planning a project becomes difficult when all of the team
members of the project are not working according to a globally defined calendar.
For instance, Tom may be working on the project everyday from 13 pm to 17 pm and Stephanie might leave for maternity leave during July. All of these will impact the project schedule.

In the earlier versions of the Project Planner it was not possible to set calendar for the resources and hence project managers had to keep track of each individuals’ working times and holidays while planning the project. Hence to help the managers with the different working times of his/her team members, a new feature, resource dependant calendar has been introduced in Project Planner. Resource dependant calendar can be defined as the one, which stores expected working and non-working days and hours for a particular resource. Non-working days usually include weekends, holidays and vacation days.

With this new feature of project planner it is possible to have a working times calendar for each of the resources so that the Project planner automatically considers this calendar for the task allocations. For instance, say Peter is going on a holiday for a week. Project Planner will warn you, if you are allocating any tasks to Peter in this week.

Resource dependant calendar can help the project manager by providing the following functionalities :

To view the availability of resources when assigning them to the tasks i.e. Check if the resource is on leave or has different working timings
To avoid over-allocation of any resource - i.e. The load on a resource can be viewed
To avoid the over-allocation of the resource when the resource is working on more than one project at a time

Company Calendar
Project Planner uses a calendar, called the Company calendar, to define the default working and nonworking days used for scheduling tasks for company wide projects. It will be used as a base calendar for all the projects in the organization. By default Project Planner sets the working days to five days a week from Monday to Friday and working hours to 8 hours per day from 9:00 to 13:00 in the morning and 14:00 to 18:00 in the afternoon. Apart from this default calendar different calendar templates are available for use for the managers.

The administrator can edit this default company calendar to reflect the organization's regular working and nonworking days and hours. You can also designate the exceptions to the normal workdays, such as holidays, or time periods when the organization will be closed for remodeling, a company wide meeting time when no work should be scheduled, and so on.

Project Calendar

Project Calendar applies to all the resources utilized within the project. By default this calendar takes the working days and hours information from the Company Calendar. If the project needs a different working days and hours from the company calendar, then the project manager has to set this calendar. For example if the customer for a project is in a different time zone and if the team has to work so that the communication with the customer possible, then the project work timings have to be different from the company working hours.

Global Resource Calendar

Each of the projects can take the resources from a global resource pool. These global resources can have their own calendars, which are called as Global resource calendars. Global resource calendar also takes the company calendar as its base calendar. The administrator or the project manager can do any modifications to this calendar. The leaves planned by the resources can be reflected in this calendar, as these will applicable to all the projects on which the resource is working. For example if Peter has taken one-week leave and if this is updated in his global resource calendar then it will be reflected in all the projects he is working on.

Project Resource Calendar

The project calendar is used as the base calendar for project resource calendars. The Global resource calendar of the corresponding resource, if available, is also used as the base calendar. The resource calendar inherits all the working days and hours of its base calendars, as well as all the holidays and other exceptions in its base calendars. The project manager can edit the resource calendar to record the days and hours when the availability of the resource differs from the normal working times found in the base calendar.

For example, if Peter is working on 2 different projects and if he wants to distribute his working hours between these 2 projects then this has to be updated in the project resource calendars of Peter in both of these projects. In project ‘A’ Peter works from 9 to 13 and in Project ‘B’ from 14 to 18. In this case the Project resource calendar for Peter in Project ‘A’ will have his working timings from 9 to 13 and the same in Project ‘B’ will have it has 14 to 18.

Usage and availability of a resource

Project Planner will give the warning messages if the resource is over allocated based on the project resource calendar while the project manager is planning the project. In addition to that, for easy viewing, the project manager can view the usage and the availability of any particular resource in a project or across projects at any instant of time. Whenever the project manager wants to check for the load on any particular resource or the availability of the resource in a particular duration, he can easily check for these.


Note
 The Resource Dependent Calendar feature shall be made available with the release of 4.8 SmartWorks.


Conclusion

Your greatest resource is your time. -Brian Tracy

Previously managing this greatest resource - time was not easy with Project Planner for human resources. Now with the latest release of the Project Planner each resource’s time can be managed very well with this new feature resource dependant calendar. It allows the project manager to keep track of the working days, non-working days and working timings of each of his/her team members and plan the project better.