Resource time allocation

Cathy Fraser

Hi, 

I am new to Smartsheet (have used MS Project) I am looking how the following would be best to implement. An overall task may take say 15d's out of that 15d's an assigned resource may only be required for 1 day out of those 15d's.  

Thanks for your help in advance.

Cap

 

Andres Pimentel

Hi,

Unless you are able to find something new, from what I have seen and read this is not possible just like you can't assign more then one resource to a task and it be visible in the resource view (usage).

J. Craig Williams

Cap,

To convert duration to effort, you need to use the % Allocation column (must be enabled in the Project Settings, if you start from the New Project Template, the column will need to be added)

6.66% will convert the 120 hours (15 work days if working hours =8) to 8 hours.

However, you will see ~ 0.5 hr each of those 3 weeks for resources.

The system does not (and can not) know when you will need those 8 hours.

The math is correct, it just looks odd.

In my opinion, there are several ways to handle this.

(1) If you are looking to determine if over the 3 week period, the resource is overbooked, then you can build a system to consolidate the work for the resource management to understand what you want to see.

For example,

Sheet 1 (Project Level 2) has tasks and sub-tasks and is where the Project Dependencies are enabled. On this sheet, Resource Management is not enabled.

The summary tasks for this sheet are linked to another Sheet 2 (Project Level 1) where Resource Management is enabled.

This will work if the summary tasks from Project Level 2 'line up' by resource and task. That is, if Person A has 12 tasks that cover 3 weeks but there are those "1 day some time in those three week" type tasks.

If the summary task has several resources or if the resources are "jumping around" between summary tasks, then this won't work. However, often a careful review of the WBS make lead to insight where the project plan still works when organized with the limitations of Smartsheet in mind.

(2) Keeping that idea in mind, you could consolidate the resource tasking together at the top (or bottom) of the sheet and links those rows out to a sheet where Resource Management is enabled. You may hit limitations of which columns can have formulas however, and this has also been a stumbling block for me.

(3) If you "1 day sometime in the these 3 weeks" kind of tasks are at least definable to a specific day, I have set up 5 work-day sheets where only 1 of the days in the week are a work-day. Monday tasks go on Monday's sheet, etc... This was useful for capturing the "non-work that is work" like training, team meetings, planned outages, that sort of thing.

(4) For any task that can be done "any time", there is likely a predecessor that is not being accounted for. In my experience, these are the types of tasks that often get dropped or rushed because of poor time management (either by the employee or the manager). There are also likely successors that can be started as soon as that task is done, so why wait?  Best Practice (in my opinion) is to ask the person to name a day that I can stop by and ask if they are done or need an obstacle removed. If they say "the due date" too often, then I slap them upside the head.

My $0.02

Craig

 

 

 

 

Cathy Fraser

Thanks Craig, I will work through what you have advised and see what the outcome looks like.

 

Kind regards

Cathy