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Resource Labour Planning

Ian PerrinsMember for 18 years
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We are wanting to use P6 as a tool to track our staffing. Essentially, we want to assign staff to a project (we’re an architectural practice), set the project duration and weight the staff according to their involvement on the project as a percentage - some staff members are on more than one project in a lesser capacity.

The output would then give us an overview of who’s on what, who’s light and who’s over-committed.

I’ve been trying to do this for a while now, and though I’m quite new to P6, I’ve tried various methods, formats and report outputs to no avail. I’ve already added all our staff members as resources. Now I’m even trying a method where the staff member is a WBS and the project name the activity - which is not really ideal.

Does anyone have any experience in producing such a report?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. If someone has a template they could send to me, that would be fab!

Thanks in advance.

1 reply

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    Mark Porter ·
    Hi Ian,

    If I understand your requirements correctly, what you are asking should be relatively staight forward.

    You need to ensure that you have correctly configured your project defaults to do what you are aiming to do.

    Without spending to much time on setting up a trial myself, I’d say as a minimium you need to look at the following;

    1) Ensure that you have correctly configured each of your resources default unit/time & max unit/time to match the the hours that they are actually able to work. e.g. 8hrs/day default, up to max 10hrs/day (inc OT)

    2) Ensure that each individual resource calender is correctly set, as per the individual resources avaliablity including annual leave, etc. as it becomes known to you.

    3) Set your activity type to equal resource dependant.

    4) Set the budget to the activities (I’d sugest that for this exercise, you do so in hours)

    5) Assign your resources to the project and set their budgeted unit/time based upon their avaliablity... e.g. 4hr/d would = 50% of their time on that particular activity (Please note: You can also display this as a % by going to the edit... user preferences... time units tab, & selecting the show as a percentage radio button)

    6) In the Projects view, decide if you want the resources to "drive activity dates by default" If this is checked it will push out the finish date of any activity where your resource(s) is/are overloaded.

    7) In the activity window, use the resource assignments view to analyse each overloaded resource & adjust accordingly. ensure that you have the display: all projects view checked and that the " all closed projects (except what-if projects)" radio button is selected in the resource analysis tab of the user preferences window.

    8) If required level the resources to prevent overloading(though I dont personally recommend this option)

    In closing, based on what you are looking at doing & if your organisation isn’t to big, you should investigate linking in to the Primavera timesheets application as it looks like your requirements would be a ideal fit

    Hope this info helps

    Kind Regards

    Mark Porter

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