Describe project scheduling and resourcing
Execution and analysis capability in Project Operations is made up of multiple topics, such as resource management, schedule management, and cost tracking capabilities.
Schedule management
With Project Operations, you can schedule worker resources based either on the requirements and schedule of a project or on the skills and availability of workers. This capability enables you to deploy your organization’s workers efficiently and effectively. You can quickly find the most qualified workers who are available to work on your project, and you can easily assess how those workers might be used more effectively during the project.
Here are some of the ways that you can use the resource scheduling functionality:
Use information about a worker’s attributes, such as education, skills, certifications, and experience to match the worker to project requirements.
Use information about a worker’s calendar and availability to match the worker’s schedule to the project calendar.
Review the capacity of each worker and determine how that capacity is used. For example, if a worker is underused, the worker can be assigned to a project that fits their availability and attributes.
Review a worker's availability to make sure there are no calendar conflicts with the worker's assignments.
Review information about worker utilization in either a summary view (for example, by department or by worker) or a detailed view (for example, by workers in a department or by weekly detail for each worker).
Modify resource assignments for various units of time, such as day, week, or month, to optimize how the workers are used.
Resource management
One challenge for project managers and resource managers during the project planning stage is resource allocation. They must determine and reserve the correct resource to work on a project. In Finance, resourcing capabilities for projects let you define roles that are treated as temporary resources that can be reserved for a specific engagement or part of an engagement. This type of resourcing lets project managers and resource managers complete the following tasks:
Define a role that has the required competencies so that it's easy to match resources.
Use roles to define an initial engagement schedule that is based on reserved resources.
Estimate costs and determine an initial budget, based on assigned roles and resources for a project.
Use roles to estimate the number of resource reservations that are required for each engagement.
Estimate the number of resources that are required for the whole life cycle of a project.
Draft a work breakdown structure (WBS) by using the initial resource assignments.
Resource competencies are an essential part of resource management. Competencies can be used as a baseline to determine resources that have the correct balance of skills, education, certification, and project experience. Project Operations has features to maintain resources based on competency.
The following screenshot displays the weekly resource availability in Project Operations applications.
