Here's my dilemma...
13 simultanious projects with a single team of 12 -14 people plus a few outide vendors and contractors.
I can set dependancies within a single project and carefully arrange schedules to maximize effeciency and make sure no one is over allocated. OK, no problem. And yes, before Craig asks, I can even have everyone involved look at the schedule and sign off on it. However, it's impossible for me to do this across all 13 projects in real time.
As soon as one thing changes in one of the schedules, the ripple effect destroys any carefully calculated manual offsets that I might try to build into the various schedules and BAM! POW! WHACK! everybody's at either 300% or 0%. When I start linking cells and setting dependencies, it can often be even worse. As soon as I do that, Team Member A is scheduled to perform vitals tasks while she's on vacation and now we're a week behind on that project which ripples out another project and we end up missing a fixed start date with an outside vendor.
If I spend a not inconsiderable amount of time fixing everything, it just breaks again the moment a deadline gets missed, somebody calls in sick or a UPS shipment doesn't arrive on time (or sits in the mail room for 2 days before anybody thinks to look for it).
Resource View might help reconcile resources for one or two projects at a time, but it's basically useless in this situation
Any ideas?
