Ressource Management

Within a team of 13 users in Smartsheet, we are struggling with the resource management and allocation of tasks. If I want to allocate a task to a staff member which will require 30% of his or her time over a period of 2 months (but without knowing when he or she will work on this precisely), how can I do that ?

Also, if I change the starting date of an activity, it automatically changes the end date. How can I change it, so that the duration changes and not the end date ?

Don't know if that makes sense ...

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Comments

Richard Rymill SBP

Hi Sophie

I can understand the challenges you describe and while we could make some quick workaround suggestions that will help, I suggest what would help you more is to talk through your workflow and see if we can modify the way you work with Smartsheet to get more out of it. It is an excellent tool and by making it really easy to use, they havent been able to provide quite as much flexibility as you might find in far more expensive solutions, but we do find ,that with some careful design work we can addrerss 90 = % of project management needs. Happy to discuss this if you wish?

RichardR

Sophie Charpie

Thanks you very much Richars. Yes, I'm happy to discuss some workaround suggestions that you would have to help us slightly changing the way we are using Smartsheet in our organisations.

When would you be available ? Can we use Skpye ?

Thanks so much for your help,

Sophie

Richard Rymill SBP

Hi Sophie

Yes Skype is ideal. Depends what timezone you are in but we are on GMT in the UK and my Skype id is richardrymill Leeds UK

I have some time available Friday and Monday.

Can we arrange by email? richardr@smarterbusinessprocesses.com

Regards

Richard

JamesR

Sophie,

I am a collegue of Richards, and he has asked me to assist in this query.

Can we help? Yes and No.

You can not have both things as they work against eachother.

Firstly - Partial allocation of resources. You need to ad a % Allocated column and then in the Project Setup enable Dependencies and in resource management set the new column to be the Allocation % Column. When you assign to then also specify the percentage and the duration. This will the do a flat contour of the percentage accross the period. You will be able to see the result in the resource management view.

Secondly - Entering new start date. You will need to disable Dependencies which then unlinks the three coulumns (Duration, Start and Finish) and you can enter whatever you like into one but t=neither of the others will calculate. It becomes like Excel. If you wanted there to be a calculation then you would need to create that in the duration column so that when you enter a start date the duration recalculates rather than the end date moving. You will no longer have Resource management views

I hope this helps and if we can be of any further help view my profile and visit our website to see what we do and contact us if appropriate.