Staff Resource Planning Using MS Project

Does you staff work on single tasks or projects with multible tasks  All of this would effect how you would start the schedule.   If your looking for lag time or free time that you can assign more work to that individual how will you get the estimated time for the tasks   lots to think about before you same that a single person has slack time available

Hi Joseph,

One way would be to list each member of the staff and then simply indent the jobs/work as single activities under each staff member. You then assign the staff member as a resource to each of the activities under them and then it's a simple case of moving the gantt bars around until you are happy with the amount of work that staff member has. To view each resources work load, go to the resource graph view. A clever way to view all the resources in the resource graph is to create an activity in your schedule seperate from the rest of your working activities with all the resources assigned to it, but with say a few minutes work for each resource. To view all the resources you can then click on this activity and then scroll through all the resources in the resource graph view. Without this you will need to click on an activity with a resource assigned individually. This can get frustrating if you want to quickly compare staff member workloads to see over and under allocation. There are many other ways to do staff planning, but this way is a simple solution to get you going.

Unless I am missing something in your question, this is the standard MS Project functionality.

Create resources in View=>Resources

Create tasks (schedule) is Gantt diagram view

Assign resources to tasks.

To see resource utilisation go View=> Resource usage