I’m trying to come up with a solution for resource planning for my team. I’m thinking that Project is probably going to be a good tool for me to use, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how to morph it into my actual needs.
Here’s the background of what I’ve got and what I’m trying to accomplish:
My team consists of three people – one manager (who is also hands-on), one senior sysadmin, and one sysadmin. Generally speaking, all team members have the same responsibilities (listed below), with the exception of me (manager) who is only about 50% dedicated to these responsibilities, but can be assigned to any of them.
Team members split time (theoretically 50⁄50) between project work and operations
One sysadmin is assigned specifically to a project
What I want to be able to do is book 50% of time to ops, and then using the remainder of the available time for the person, assign them to the projects. I don’t need a lot of detail on the projects – for example, I know I am working on the Widget Upgrade project, which will start on March 1 and finish up April 15. I would like to be able to adjust the amount of hours per week (for example, the first week of the project I might have 8 hours of work, but other weeks I might only have 2 hours per week, with the last week being 12 hours, or something like that).
I can’t quite muddle out how to get this to work in Project. I know how to use Project for, well, projects, but this kind of on-going thing is really messing with my heads. Any MS Project gurus out there that can point me in the right direction?
(I’m using Project 2007, if it makes a difference).